Nashville Scene 3-3-22

I FREE MARCH 3–9, 2022 I VOLUME 41 I NUMBE R 5 I NASHVI LLESCE NE.COM

CITY LIMITS: OUR INTERVIEWS WITH ALL THREE DISTRICT ATTORNEY CANDIDATES PAGE 6

FOOD & DRINK: XIAO BAO IS SERVING SOME OF THE BEST FOOD IN TOWN PAGE 30

Student activists, the Youth Poet Laureate, banned books, our first student essay contest and more

CAMP GUIDE INSIDE

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2/28/22 5:43 PM

To her, the world was a source of endless inspiration—and her work is endlessly inspiring.

In 1972, at age eighty, Alma W. Thomas became the first Black woman to have a solo show at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Ar t. Fifty years later, an unprecedented number of her joyful and color ful abstract paintings are on view at the Frist. Their titles and forms express her interest in flora and fauna, music, space travel and spirituality. Come experience an exhibition that offers an example of a life defined by constant creativity while paying tribute to one of the most impor tant American painters of the twentieth century.

THROUGH JUNE 5 Downtown Nashville, 919 Broadway, Nashville, TN 37203 FristArtMuseum.org @FristArtMuseum #TheFrist #FristAlmaWThomas

Co-organized by the Chrysler Museum of Art and The Columbus Museum, Georgia Aflac is proud to sponsor Alma W. Thomas: Everything Is Beautiful. The exhibition has also been made possible in par t by major suppor t from the Henry Luce Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Ar ts, and the National Endowment for the Ar ts.

Suppor ted in par t by

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Spanish translation sponsor

The Frist Ar t Museum is suppor ted in par t by

NASHVILLE SCENE | MARCH 3 – MARCH 9, 2022 | nashvillescene.com

Alma W. Thomas (American, 1891–1978). Snoopy Sees a Sunrise (detail), 1970. Acrylic on canvas. Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, Washington, DC, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. David K. Anderson, NASM 5691, A19770452000

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2/25/22 2:48 PM

CONTENTS

MARCH 3, 2022

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Sizing Up the District Attorney Race ........6

Crawl Space: March 2022

CITY LIMITS

Talking to Glenn Funk, Sara Beth Myers and P. Danielle Nellis about their stances on the death penalty, marijuana, violent crime and more

BY STEVE CAVENDISH

Funding Formula Drop ...............................8 First reactions to the Tennessee Investment in Student Achievement Act

BY KELSEY BEYELER

Pith in the Wind .........................................8

This week on the Scene’s news and politics blog

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COVER STORY The Student Issue

THIS WEEK ON THE WEB:

ART

This month’s First Saturday events include must-see shows at Elephant Gallery, Modfellows, Julia Martin Gallery and Red Arrow Gallery

BY JOE NOLAN

A Room With a View

Vadis Turner’s Window Treatments is a multimedia meditation on liminal spaces

Speaking to student activists about why they get involved with causes like child hunger and climate justice

BY ALEJANDRO RAMIREZ AND ASHLEY BARRIENTOS

Talking to Metro Nashville’s Student Board Members ........................ 11 Student members of the school board on censorship, empathy and more

BY KELSEY BEYELER

Meet the Nashville Youth Poet Laureate .. 12 University School of Nashville junior Sheerea Yu hopes her poetry will effect change

BY ERICA CICCARONE

Student Essay Contest ............................ 13 Read a piece by the winner of our inaugural student essay contest, presented with The Porch Writers’ Collective

Banned Book Roundup .......................... 14 Certain adults don’t want students reading these books — so put them on your reading list

BY HANNAH HERNER

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John Rich and the Latest Wave of Silly Busybodies

BY JOE NOLAN

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BOOKS

Nashvillians Are Supporting Ukraine by Shopping at Aleksey’s

Lee Cole’s Groundskeeping considers love, class and identity

TPAC Announces 2022-2023 Broadway Season

A Troubled South

Youth Activism and Advocacy ............... 10

Joy Oladokun and Tim Gent Shout Out Strong Spirits in ‘Fortune Favors the Bold’

BY ABBY N. LEWIS AND CHAPTER 16

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MUSIC

K.C. Masterpiece ..................................... 36 Led by polymath Allen Epley, Shiner rolls into town behind their instant post-hardcore classic Schadenfreude

ON THE COVER:

Collage by Elizabeth Jones; Photo by Eric England

BY CHARLIE ZAILLIAN

Short Cuts ................................................ 36 Kyle Frederick’s Mr. Mercurial is a masterpiece of concision

BY EDD HURT

The Spin ................................................... 37 The Scene’s live-review column checks out Namir Blade, SeddyMac and more at Mercy Lounge

BY CHARLIE ZAILLIAN

38 FILM

Aye, Robot

CRITICS’ PICKS

Yola w/Allison Russell & Devon Gilfillian, The Green Knight, Opera Out Loud, Nashville Symphony’s Pops Spectacular, The Del McCoury Band, Dolly Parton and James Patterson Virtual Book Launch, Billie Eilish, The Righteous Gemstones and more

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Kogonada’s After Yang is beautiful and raw, but predictable

BY NADINE SMITH

Big Shorts

See this year’s Oscar-nominated short films on the big screen at the Belcourt

BY JOE NOLAN

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CAMP GUIDE

NEW YORK TIMES CROSSWORD

FOOD AND DRINK Xiao Wow

While building out its East Nashville restaurant, Xiao Bao is serving some of the best food in town out of a trailer at The Dive Motel

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nashvillescene.com nashvillescene.com | MARCH 3 – MARCH 9, 2022 | NASHVILLE SCENE

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2/28/22 6:15 PM

PET OF THE WEEK!

FROM BILL FREEMAN

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She loves giving headbutts, laying on your lap, and sleeping in your bed. She also has a playful side: Her guilty pleasure is laser pointers. That is her most favorite thing to chase and try to catch and will 100% give her the zoomies too! Best way to win over Ophelia’s affection is to give her lots of chin pets. A sure guaranteed way that she will love you forever!

Call 615.352.1010 or visit nashvillehumane.org Located at 213 Oceola Ave., Nashville, TN 37209

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with LINDSAY LYNCH at PARNASSUS Groundskeeping SATURDAY, MARCH 5

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YUYI MORALES at PARNASSUS Bright Star & Dreamers 2:00PM - 3:00PM

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Editor-in-Chief D. Patrick Rodgers Senior Editor Dana Kopp Franklin Associate Editor Alejandro Ramirez Arts Editor Laura Hutson Hunter Culture Editor Erica Ciccarone Music and Listings Editor Stephen Trageser Contributing Editor Jack Silverman Staff Writers Kelsey Beyeler, Stephen Elliott, Nancy Floyd, J.R. Lind, Kathryn Rickmeyer, William Williams Contributing Writers Sadaf Ahsan, Radley Balko, Ashley Brantley, Maria Browning, Steve Cavendish, Chris Chamberlain, Lance Conzett, Steve Erickson, Randy Fox, Adam Gold, Seth Graves, Kim Green, Steven Hale, Steve Haruch, Edd Hurt, Jennifer Justus, Christine Kreyling, Katy Lindenmuth, Craig D. Lindsey, Brittney McKenna, Marissa R. Moss, Noel Murray, Joe Nolan, Betsy Phillips, John Pitcher, Margaret Renkl, Daryl Sanders, Megan Seling, Jason Shawhan, Michael Sicinski, Nadine Smith, Ashley Spurgeon, Amy Stumpfl, Kay West, Abby White, Andrea Williams, Ron Wynn, Charlie Zaillian Editorial Intern Ashley Barrientos Art Director Elizabeth Jones Photographers Eric England, Matt Masters, Daniel Meigs Graphic Designers Mary Louise Meadors, Tracey Starck Production Coordinator Christie Passarello Events and Marketing Director Olivia Britton Marketing and Promotions Manager Robin Fomusa Publisher Mike Smith Senior Advertising Solutions Managers Maggie Bond, Sue Falls, Michael Jezewski, Carla Mathis, Heather Cantrell Mullins, Jennifer Trsinar, Keith Wright Advertising Solutions Managers Richard Jacques, Deborah Laufer, William Shutes, Niki Tyree Sales Operations Manager Chelon Hill Hasty Advertising Solutions Associates Jada Goggins, Caroline Poole, Alissa Wetzel Special Projects Coordinator Susan Torregrossa

AMTRAK SERVICE IN TENNESSEE — WHO’S ON BOARD? Amtrak recently unveiled plans to expand rail travel to Tennessee, with its newest Connects US map showing a line running from Atlanta through Chattanooga to Nashville. Many Tennesseans are excited about the prospect of rail travel coming back to Nashville, and the idea is gaining support — including from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. This is because Amtrak could reduce highway traffic, which we obviously need, and create jobs.

The idea of rail travel in our city and state is not new. Amtrak offered service from Nashville to Atlanta, but that service was discontinued. In 1979, we lost service altogether when the Chicago-to-Miami line that ran through the city was discontinued.

Since then, lawmakers have been talking about it somewhat regularly. In 2020, Rep. Jason Powell (D-Nashville) sponsored a bill to examine the viability of rail expansion in the state. The bill had great interest and passed the Senate, but was later dropped by the House Calendar and Rules Committee in part because of COVID-19.

Today, however, we have a completely different situation. As Powell told Tennessee Lookout, “There is unprecedented momentum right now for passenger rail here in Tennessee because of the $1 trillion infrastructure bill that recently passed.” In President Joe Biden’s infrastructure plan, $66 billion is targeted for passenger rail — the largest investment in passenger rail service since Amtrak began.

Still, our state has much to do — and as Democratic state Rep. Yusuf Hakeem of Chattanooga says, “We need to strike while the iron is hot.”

Powell has called for the creation of a Train Travel Caucus that would bring Amtrak service back to our state, starting with a Nashville-Chattanooga-Atlanta line and then moving to Bristol and Memphis. This bipartisan caucus would spearhead the expanding and promoting of rail transportation in Tennessee. If found feasible, the Connect US line could include stops in Nashville, at the Nashville International Airport, in Murfreesboro and in Tullahoma.

How will we know if it is feasible?

Powell is sponsoring another bill, HB2278, that directs the Tennessee Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations to study the feasibility and cost of passenger rail. The state would set up a new entity, the Tennessee Agency of Rail and Public Transportation, to work with local, state and federal government to support rail transportation.

REP. JASON POWELL Obviously, as with any step forward, there will be obstacles to overcome. There will be questions from community members, businesses and lawmakers. How will the infrastructure work? How much of it already exists? Currently, CSX owns major portions of the railroad system in Tennessee. They too will have questions, but CSX appears open to a passenger rail system. Spokesperson Cindy Schild says the company has more passenger services than any other railroad in areas of high population. That said, they still want plans to be directed in a way that will not negatively impact communities or freight-rail operations.

State Sen. Jon Lundberg, a Republican from Bristol, told the Lookout that he is excited about the project but is concerned about negotiations with railroad companies, because they want to “put as much freight on the tracks as possible, which conflicts with passenger trains.” And there may be areas where portions of the rail system must be reconstructed for trains to pass each other. But as CSX appears to be openminded, I personally feel optimistic.

I agree with Powell when he says our shift to passenger rail is “critical.” Nashville is continuing to see more and more growth. In 2020, Nashville’s Metro area was among the fastest growing metros in the United States.

The benefits of bringing back rail travel will not come overnight — it will take a lot of hard work, and a lot of time, attention and funding. But if we want to make real progress, we need to get on board this train.

President Frank Daniels III Chief Financial Officer Todd Patton Corporate Production Director Elizabeth Jones Vice President of Marketing Mike Smith IT Director John Schaeffer Circulation and Distribution Director Gary Minnis For advertising information please contact: Mike Smith, msmith@nashvillescene.com or 615-844-9238 FW PUBLISHING LLC Owner Bill Freeman VOICE MEDIA GROUP National Advertising 1-888-278-9866 vmgadvertising.com

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NASHVILLE SCENE | MARCH 3 – MARCH 9, 2022 | nashvillescene.com

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2/28/22 6:02 PM

BE SPELLBOUND. BE HOME.

Sing Me Back Home: Folk Roots to the Present EXHIBIT NOW OPEN

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nashvillescene.com | MARCH 3 – MARCH 9, 2022 | NASHVILLE SCENE

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2/28/22 10:14 AM

CITY LIMITS

SIZING UP THE DISTRICT ATTORNEY RACE

Talking to Glenn Funk, Sara Beth Myers and P. Danielle Nellis about their stances on the death penalty, marijuana, violent crime and more

BY STEVE CAVENDISH

T

o begin our coverage of the race for Nashville district attorney, the Nashville Scene sat down with all three candidates — current District Attorney Glenn Funk, Sara Beth Myers and P. Danielle Nellis. We asked about a number of topics the DA will face in the coming term. Their answers here have been lightly edited for context or space.

THE DEATH PENALTY Tennessee still allows capital punishment and has ramped up the pace of executions in recent years. Funk has not sought the death penalty during his term in office, even in the case of Travis Reinking and the 2018 Waffle House murders. It’s a sharp departure from his predecessor Torry Johnson. We asked: Will your office, as a matter of policy, seek the death penalty in a murder case?

Funk: “I have always said that I am personally opposed to the death penalty.

We have analyzed the enhancing factors on several cases and never felt like the enhancing factors outweighed the sanctity of human life.”

Myers: “I would not seek the death penalty as district attorney.”

Nellis: “No.”

BAIL REFORM A number of cities and counties around the country have begun to examine the effects of bail on pretrial incarceration rates and, in particular, the implications in terms of racial equity. We asked: How do you view the bail reform movement and how would you approach it as DA?

Funk: “So I started working on bail reform eight years ago, when I first took office. I said very clearly that my office would no longer use the fact that someone was incarcerated pretrial as an attempt to coerce a guilty plea. And what the group of stakeholders worked together to achieve was a system by which almost all misdemeanors get pretrial release, a nonmonetary release at the time that they were arrested. There are a handful of exceptions — domestic violence, DUI third offense. Or if you’ve been arrested twice in the last week. Other than that, you get out of

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jail, on a misdemeanor.

“That’s also been expanded to D and E felonies — theft over $1,000, reckless endangerment where nobody is hurt. It’s a D and E felony, where a person is not the victim. Right? If you were to shoplift from the store, over $1,000, you would get pretrial release. But if you saw my lawn mower parked in my front yard, jumped on it and took off with my lawn mower — well, you know what, you’re gonna be held, at least until a judge can review your bond the next day, and they might give you a pretrial release. So it’s not kind of a revolving door where you’re in and you’re out in less than two hours. But it still leaves bail in place for the violent felonies, aggravated robbery, murder [and] rape.”

Myers: “We’ve never had cash bail reform before. There hasn’t even been a tip of the hat in that direction before. And it’s crucial as a part of criminal justice reform. We have to make sure that people are being treated as equitably as possible in this complex system. And simply because there’s a disparity in wealth should not mean that there’s a disparity in treatment in the criminal justice system.

“So we need to make sure that people who are charged with the same offenses — one who can afford to get out pretrial and one who can’t — are able to have access to the same freedom pretrial, regardless of whether or not they can pay, but that also affects public safety.”

Nellis: “The purpose of bail is to ensure somebody appears in court, right? So if there’s an alternate way to do it, that does not negatively impact those who are unable to afford it, that’s what we need to do. Our law allows for it. Indeed, our law actually requires judges first to consider release on recognizance, and then community-based supervision, and then bail. We normally jump straight to setting the bail, in part because that middle section hasn’t been developed.

“And so in order to replace our cash bail system, we really need to look at expanding the options for communitybased supervision. Right now we have an instrument to determine whether somebody is eligible for a pretrial [release] with the sheriff’s office. The decisions, there are policy-based decisions: Who is eligible? Who is not eligible? It’s not a law-based decision.

“We need to have a more robust assessment tool in place for when people are arrested to address [and] identify any root-cause issue that has brought them in contact with the criminal justice system.

When we identify that root-cause issue, we should connect them with community-based services in conjunction with communitybased supervision so that we’re meeting that underlying need. And in doing so we reduce the number of defendants and victims overall.”

MARIJUANA Funk made a splash — and angered some members of the state legislature — when he announced that his office would no longer prosecute possession of a halfounce or less of marijuana. We asked: How do you view not prosecuting simple possession of marijuana in Nashville?

Funk: “We have seen the incarceration rate go over the last eight years from 5,000 inmate days in jail just for marijuana down to like six. We save the court system docketing cases and subpoenaing witnesses, we save jail incarceration costs. More importantly, the folks that would have been charged and potentially convicted and incarcerated for marijuana don’t have the collateral consequences of an arrest. It doesn’t show up on their record, it doesn’t preclude them from obtaining jobs or keeping jobs or getting promotions or housing.”

Myers: “That is a national trend. That is not something that’s special to Nashville. That is something that not even law enforcement is interested in prosecuting, when we have much bigger fish to fry. In terms of violent crime, we need to be focusing on violent crime.”

Nellis: “So I think our current DA rode the wave of legislation that was already in place before he took office. I think what [Funk] did is in line with what has been found to be a best practice. Now, do I agree with the way he did it? Absolutely not. Because when you announce things like that you draw the wrath of our legislature, and they become very active in eliminating the discretion of the DA, and we have to have discretion as prosecutors to make those decisions.

More specifically, I don’t think we should be prosecuting low-level drug usage. I do think that we need to make sure our resources are used to clear backlogs of 100-plus cases of homicides. The allocation of resources simply doesn’t make sense, coupled with the known and studied disparate impact on Black, brown and other communities. And if we’re going to fight systemic injustice, we have to recognize it.”

VIOLENT CRIME Depending on which statistics you look at — or which cable news outlet you’re watching — the violent crime rate is either up a little or up a lot. We asked: How do you view the violent crime rate and what can be done about it?

Funk: “Firearm possession in Nashville and across the country continues to rise.

Five years ago, our legislature passed a law that said that an automobile is an extension

of a person’s house. Last year the legislature passed a law that’s titled ‘constitutional carry.’ It said even if you don’t have any training, even if you don’t have a certificate to carry, that you can carry a gun with you, anywhere in public.

“So shootings are up. Homicide rates have returned to the numbers that we saw in the 1990s or early 2000s. Overall, violent crime has been steady in Nashville for eight years — we had had 5,000 to 6,000 felonies occur that needed to be indicted. And so overall, serious crime has remained fairly steady.

But shootings are up.

“So what do we do about it, right? Well, number one, our murder conviction rate as an office is over 95 percent. But one of the problems that I saw was that in the early 2000s [MNPD Chief Ronal] Serpas decentralized our murder squad and sent them out to the precincts. “[After MNPD Chief John Drake’s appointment] I said, ‘Well, I have one request for you right off the top, and that is to recentralize the homicides.’ And his response was, ‘You know, that actually would make a lot of sense to me. But let me ask you: How will you support that?’

And I said, ‘I will dedicate a deputy district attorney to be the liaison to the homicides.

And I will have every team leader work as kind of an advisory group to where we can meet regularly with the homicide group that you put together to brainstorm ideas of how to potentially solve [the problem].’ It’s important to have a dedicated group that’s working nothing but homicides.”

Myers: “So one of the key pillars of my campaign is crime prevention. The DA should absolutely be involved in reducing those numbers, and can be, but historically it has been a reactive office. I want it to be a proactive office. And that’s why I want to break the office up into precincts and assign assistant DAs to precincts so that they get to know the communities that they’re serving, the specific neighborhoods that they’re serving. And so that we can look at the crime data for that precinct. We know what’s going on, but we need to know why it’s happening.

“That’s where the conversations with people at the community level are going to come into play. The ADA will have quarterly listening sessions in those neighborhoods in the precincts and make sure that we’re listening to business owners, to churches, to nonprofits, to after-school programs, and make sure that we’re tailoring for those particular neighborhoods, resources on the front end to prevent crime, from ever escalating to the criminal justice system level. We need to start with prevention. It’s just never been done before. There’s no reason why we can’t do it.

“We just have to be outward-facing. It doesn’t even require more resources or an increase in the budget of the office. It’s simply a restructuring and making the DA’s office community-facing in a way that — just because it’s never been done, people don’t know who their prosecutors are. So when there’s an emergency, they’ll meet their prosecutor for the first time.

And that’s unacceptable. You need to have a relationship beforehand, so that you can stop the problem before it escalates. And that type of solution is being tried in various

NASHVILLE SCENE | MARCH 3 – MARCH 9, 2022 | nashvillescene.com

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2/28/22 5:45 PM

CITY LIMITS

GLENN FUNK

“We have seen the incarceration rate go over the last eight years from 5,000 inmate days in jail just for marijuana down to like six.” ways in other cities across our country.

And there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be tailoring a solution like that here in Nashville.”

Nellis: “We know that most criminal behavior is trauma response. So how are we addressing whatever the underlying trauma is, including poverty, which has been studied and determined to be a traumatic experience? How are we addressing that as a community and the way you do that?

Because the DA, every case that comes in contact with the criminal justice system goes to the DA’s office. The DA has to welcome all community stakeholders to the table to identify and align resources. So those people who are coming in contact with the criminal justice system, they’re also coming in contact with community-based resources, community-based organizations to meet that need that has brought them in contact with the criminal justice system.

And that’s for defendants, but that’s also for victims, right? There’s a need to heal for victims, whose cases are coming through the criminal justice system.”

THE ANDREW DELKE CASE One of the highest-profile prosecutions of Funk’s term was the prosecution of police officer Andrew Delke for the shooting of Daniel

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SARA BETH MYERS

“We’ve never had cash bail reform before. There hasn’t even been a tip of the hat in that direction before.

And it’s crucial as a part of criminal justice reform.”

Hambrick. Funk was criticized for reaching a plea agreement the week before the trial was to begin. We asked: In retrospect, should the Delke case have been taken to trial?

Funk: “I stand by that decision, and I made the right decision for that case, and I made the right decision for Nashville in that case. The victim, Daniel Hambrick, had a handgun in his hand at the time that the officer told him to drop the gun and stop or he would shoot. I do not believe that the officer had a right, when the man was just running away from him, to shoot him in the back. And I believe that that was a first-degree murder — I think was premeditated. I think it was intentional. I think he obviously killed him. If the case had gone to trial, other factors would have come out during the trial, such as Mr. Hambrick’s record — which the officer did not know about at the time that he was chasing. But under Tennessee law, the jury would have known about some of his Facebook postings.

“Is there a chance that the officer would have been convicted of first-degree murder? Yes, that was not a 0 percent chance. Is there a chance the officer would have been acquitted? Most of the time in the United States the officer is not even charged. If this had been an acquittal, then would you really have wanted your day in court if the officer got no accountability, and an overwhelming chance that it would have

P. DANIELLE NELLIS

“So how are we addressing whatever the underlying trauma is, including poverty, which has been studied and determined to be a traumatic experience?”

been a hung jury? If it’s a hung jury, there’s no conviction and there’s no accountability.

Andrew Delke admitted he was guilty.

Andrew Delke is now a convicted felon.

Andrew Delke is in jail tonight.

“I understand why some people think, ‘Well, you should have at least put on a trial.’

I’ll take a conviction with an admission of guilt and incarceration over a very high probability of a hung jury and a possibility of acquittal.”

Myers: “I will tell you from a procedural standpoint, that it was completely mishandled from the very beginning to the very end. And that was stepping outside of the procedure, really, for the purpose of making headlines. That was a very frustrating thing for me to watch, in that how it was portrayed, how it was handled, even in terms of getting the indictment was outside of the regular procedure for how an indictment is usually obtained.

“And the DA herself or himself would not be one to pursue that unless you’re doing it for headlines. So from the very beginning, that case was chosen by that DA’s office to be highlighted in a way that is detrimental, for everyone involved in that case. Cases should be handled the same way, procedurally, for everyone, regardless of who they are, or what’s going on in the country, or what’s going on in Nashville. But when they’re not, when people deviate from that procedure to make headlines, that is

dangerous for the community.

“So it was mishandled all the way from indictment to the grand finale that we all witnessed so publicly in our national media, for the lack of victim communication.

And victims have rights — victims have statutory rights to be informed about what’s going on in the system. There was not communication. And I know that for a fact from numerous sources, the members of the victim’s family were not aware of that plea deal until after it had already been made.

That is simply unacceptable.”

Nellis: “So you know that on Thursday [before the trial], [Daniel Hambrick’s mother] Vickie Hambrick got a phone call. And then moments later, the media was aware that that was a plea. Really our Constitution requires that victims at least be informed if not involved at every critical juncture of a case. My understanding is that they started calling the court on Tuesday or Wednesday to get approval.

That’s contrary to what our Constitution requires, if you’ve already made a plea deal, and you didn’t involve a family and to then expect her to show up on Friday morning? When she lost her only child and had been promised a trial all along? They had pulled a special jury to sit on Monday.

And we’re litigators, right? We’re trial attorneys. There’s no reason not to have that trial, except for political reasons.”

EMAIL EDITOR@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

2/28/22 5:44 PM

CITY LIMITS

FUNDING FORMULA DROP First reactions to the Tennessee Investment in Student Achievement Act

BY KELSEY BEYELER

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education spending.

“This plan makes an important down payment, but when it comes to public school funding, the details matter,” says state Sen. Raumesh Akbari (D-Memphis), who sits on the Senate Education Committee. “This law could affect an entire generation of students and teachers. With stakes this high, we cannot afford to get this wrong.”

The TISA Act is set to pay for everything that is already covered in the BEP and more. The formula includes a base that covers school staff, technology and safety, and weights for students and their specific learning needs, plus direct and outcome-based funding to districts. While every student starts out with a base amount of $6,860,

PHOTO: DANIEL MEIGS

n Feb. 24, state education commissioner Penny Schwhinn and Gov. Bill Lee announced the Tennessee Investment in Student Achievement Act. If the proposal passes in this year’s legislative session, it could change the way Tennessee’s schools are funded, starting in the 2023-24 school year. The TISA Act would replace the current Basic Education Program — a 30-year-old funding formula that many have sought to change for years on the grounds that it does not adequately fund education.

Not only would the TISA Act change the funding structure, it would also inject a recurring $1 billion of state funds into

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“THIS PLAN MAKES AN IMPORTANT DOWN PAYMENT, BUT WHEN IT COMES TO PUBLIC SCHOOL FUNDING, THE DETAILS MATTER.” —STATE SEN. RAUMESH AKBARI

some students are eligible for additional funding based on their individual needs, socioeconomic status and location, among other aspects. Charter school facilities also get additional weighted funding.

“We think [the formula] incorporates a lot of the things that we were looking for in terms of weights and an ambitious base,” says Metro Nashville School Board District 8 representative Gini Pupo-Walker, who also serves as director of the Education Trust in Tennessee, a nonprofit that has led education-funding-related discussions in Nashville. “We think it is an important step in the right direction.” Pupo-Walker notes, however, that she would have liked to see the formula address pre-K. A significant aspect of the TISA Act is its emphasis on transparency. The legislation would require schools and districts to publicly report their spending. It would also hold low-performing districts accountable by requiring them to present to an ad hoc education finance committee.

“While we applaud this transparency, we are uncertain how the plan’s shift in accountability will play out,” says Nashville Public Education Foundation president and CEO Katie Cour in a press release. “We will continue to monitor any potential impacts of changes to accountability on Nashville’s governance structure.”

Sen. John Lundberg (R-Bristol), acting chair of the Senate Education Committee, thinks the TISA Act is “really transformative, number one in transparency [and] number two in the funding formula. … I think something like this has the potential to make a huge impact in a very positive way down the road.”

Lundberg does, however, question the longevity of the TISA Act. “I want to make certain that what we do isn’t just good for next year, but in five years and 10 years, because this is a plan that should live with us for a long, long time.”

Now that the formula is out, legislators will begin reviewing the bill through seven different committees before it hits the House and Senate floors for voting. This process could introduce changes to the bill, and some are concerned that such a momentous piece of legislation will be rushed through by lawmakers. There is still time, however, to call legislators and provide feedback of your own.

“We didn’t get into this education funding deficit overnight, and we are going to need more than a few weeks to set us on the right path forward,” says Akbari .

EMAIL EDITOR@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

THIS WEEK ON OUR NEWS AND POLITICS BLOG: Metro Nashville Public Schools will end its mask mandate once students return from spring break March 21. The school board voted 7-1 to end the requirement in the midst of another heated meeting in which parents once again yelled at the board, prompting the otherwise quiet Gini Pupo-Walker to drop an F-bomb in frustration. Fran Bush was the only member who voted against ending the mandate — because she wanted to drop masks sooner. … Metro officials promised improvements in trash pickup service following months of delays in the wake of contractor Red River’s October bankruptcy.

Mayor John Cooper called Red River’s deficiencies “outrageous” and said the city would bring on two emergency vendors to help pick up trash. … Three voters backed by the Tennessee Democratic Party are suing GOP Gov. Bill Lee and other state officials over newly approved redistricting plans. The lawsuit, filed in Davidson County Chancery Court last week, focuses on the new maps for the state legislature rather than the more high-profile congressional maps. The lawsuit argues that the General Assembly districts violate the Tennessee Constitution, in part, because districts in the same county are not numbered consecutively. Further, the suit says the House districts split far more counties than was necessary. … In one of the least surprising announcements in recent memory, former state House Speaker Beth Harwell announced she is seeking the Republican nomination for the 5th Congressional District seat, now far more GOP-friendly after redistricting. She’ll square off in a crowded primary that so far includes Trump-endorsed former State Department aide Morgan Ortagus, former National Guard Brig.

Gen. Kurt Winstead and businessman Baxter Lee. … A raft of bills, all of which seek to control or outright censor textbooks, library books, curricula and other teaching materials, are up for consideration in the state legislature. One such bill presumably seeks to hamstring critical race theory at the state’s public colleges and universities — though, of course, it doesn’t define the concept. Others would make school libraries subject to parental review. Another requires school districts to develop a plan to ensure materials are “age appropriate.” (The bill, naturally, does not provide any sort of standard for that concept.)

And yet another bill bars public schools from having “obscene materials or materials harmful to minors” without, naturally, defining those terms. … Speaking of book banners, contributor Betsy Phillips writes that “Save a Horse (Ride a Cowboy)” singer John Rich is 2022’s Tipper Gore — a comparison that will surely upset him — given that both Rich and his ilk and Gore’s Parents Music Resource Center are basically trying to keep children from the “corruptive” influence of art. Let’s hope Dee Snider rhetorically slaps Rich around too. … Local activist group Stand Up Nashville and others are raising concerns that the Tennessee Titans’ dreams of a new East Bank enormodome will further displace folks already contending with astronomical rent increases.

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NASHVILLE SCENE | MARCH 3 – MARCH 9, 2022 | nashvillescene.com

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2/28/22 5:44 PM

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nashvillescene.com | MARCH 3 – MARCH 9, 2022 | NASHVILLE SCENE

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Student activists, the Youth Poet Laureate, banned books, our first student essay contest and more

Youth Activism and Advocacy

Speaking to student activists about why they get involved with causes like child hunger and climate justice

BY ALEJANDRO RAMIREZ AND ASHLEY BARRIENTOS YOUTH ACTIVISM on both the national and local level has been particularly visible in the past few years. There were student walkouts in cities across the U.S. in January to protest the lack of COVID-19 precautions in schools. Students who survived 2018’s school shooting in Parkland, Fla., have advocated for gun reform in various states, attracting other high-schoolers to the cause.

In summer 2020, Nashville saw a massive protest against police brutality organized by a group of teenage girls.

While youth organizing efforts can often lead to protests in places like state capitol buildings, they sometimes start in high school clubs with students like Avery Shippen.

Shippen, a senior at Hume-Fogg, is president of her school’s Save the Children Active Network chapter and the treasurer and project manager of Livable Schools, an environmental sustainability club. SCAN advocates for issues like access to education, ending child hunger and protecting the rights of children who arrive at the U.S.-Mexico border. As part of that group, Shippen has helped organize postcardwriting campaigns to politicians, set up lunchtime events with U.S. Rep. Jim Cooper, coordinated phone banking and more.

Livable Schools advocates for a greener Hume-Fogg, and one recent project was a food-waste audit that measured the student

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body’s table scraps.

“I like helping people,” says Shippen, noting her experience doing volunteer work with Second Harvest Food Bank of Middle Tennessee. “I knew I wanted to continue doing something that would help people, and SCAN is a really good way to do it directly.”

Shippen says one of the things she’s most proud of is spreading awareness about “the types of topics that people don’t really want to think about when they’re in high school,” especially when it comes to issues facing children. She says high-schoolers usually try to distance themselves from being called children — pointing out that they’re almost adults, almost in college — but SCAN enables and encourages kids to speak up for other kids. “It’s been nice to see especially 17-year-olds or 18-year-olds be like, ‘OK, yeah, it’s more powerful for me to talk [about these issues] from the perspective of a student who is still a child.’ ” The Mayor’s Youth Council, sponsored by the city and coordinated by youth-outreach organization Oasis Center, also gives a platform to young activists and budding policy wonks. A few members of the council are partnering with the Cumberland River Compact to organize a youth climate summit in March. The Scene spoke via Zoom to four members of the climate committee, who say being on the council amplifies their voices and shows that their generation cares.

Eleanor Taylor, a senior at Harpeth Hall, described the Mayor’s Youth Council as “a group of youth in Nashville who are interested in various spheres of activism.”

“And so during the year, we pick a specific subject to research and then … present that to the mayor [as] our specific group,” says Taylor, adding that in addition to the environmental group there are others focused on homelessness as well as diversity and equity.

The Nashville Youth Climate Summit is the big spring project for the committee, and the rest of the semester will be focused on creating a social media account that provides resources and information for how other students can get involved in sustain-

AVERY SHIPPEN ability efforts.

Grace Olson, a junior at Martin Luther King Jr. Magnet, got involved in the youth council after attending last year’s climate summit. In addition to helping with the 2022 summit, she also founded the MNPS Environmental Committee, which is open to students from all public schools, and has spoken to school directors about efforts like composting and food waste audits.

Apeksha Sawarkar, a senior at Hume-Fogg, says the summit also gives students a chance to hear from experts who can break the topic down in an easy-to-understand manner. She adds that members of her generation might also feel a bit more urgency about the topic.

“We’ve been told that it’s going to impact

PHOTO: ERIC ENGLAND

We’re all accustomed to adults at home, in city hall, in the statehouse and in Washington making decisions on behalf of young people. So for the Scene’s inaugural Student Issue, we decided to try something novel — to listen to young people themselves.

In the stories that follow, you’ll hear from student activists, Metro’s Student Board members and the Nashville Youth Poet Laureate. You’ll also read an essay by the winner of our first student essay contest and find a list of books that — despite being removed from school curricula in some Southern counties — are very much worth a read.

As it turns out, the kids are very much all right.

us the most,” she says, “so that has made it more imperative that we really care about what’s being done now.”

Brady Mitchell, a freshman at Martin Luther King Jr., joined the council this year and says exposure to new ideas has been one of the biggest benefits of joining the project.

“It helps me understand what people are thinking and how I can help a community, such as this one, to act,” says Mitchell.

“I think other youth are able to see what change we’re making and see that they can do it themselves too,” says Olson.

The Nashville Youth Climate Summit takes place on March 5, and space is limited.

Find out more details and register at bit.do/nashycs2022. ■

NASHVILLE SCENE | MARCH 3 – MARCH 9, 2022 | nashvillescene.com

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2/28/22 6:00 PM

Talking to Metro Nashville’s Student Board Members

PARENTS THINKING THEY KNOW WHAT’S BEST FOR THEIR KIDS IS A CONCEPT THAT’S BEEN USED IN CONVERSATIONS SURROUNDING CRITICAL RACE THEORY AND CENSORSHIP. WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS ON THAT AND HOW HAS IT AFFECTED YOU? AH: So with censorship, especially concerning the books, I don’t think we’ve had the chance to actually be blocked from reading something that’s been removed from the library. But with things like CRT, you can … see a shift in the climate in the classroom, for example, after certain laws are passed by the state government banning CRT from being taught. So I think it has a lot more effect on students than people realize, because just because you’re stopping me from reading a book doesn’t necessarily mean you’re doing something that’s in my best interest. You might be stopping me from exploring something that I’m interested in … or trying to grow as a student or as a person. So there’s just that really huge shift in climate — especially after all these talks have started happening on social media and stuff concerning CRT and how students, we’re being brainwashed into thinking a certain race is responsible for a whole other race’s oppression.

AQ: I know if I were a parent, to a degree, I would want to know what my child is learning, as well. So to all the parents concerned about what’s being taught in schools, I completely respect that. … But with that being said, as well, just the whole controversy with CRT, with the banned books, is really problematic in my eyes … especially the no-CRT [law passed in Tennessee], it was on the grounds of not teaching kids biased history. But by restricting a sense of history that is honestly a part of our history, like deeply rooted, it’s not just a surface-level thing. You’re [further] restricting freedom of thought or even students’ ability to maybe question what’s going on.

Student members of the school board on censorship, empathy and more

BY KELSEY BEYELER

THE STUDENT REPRESENTATIVES of the Metro Nashville Public Schools board are arguably more mature than some of the adults surrounding them. Twice a month, Angelie Quimbo and Abenezer Haile sit in the crossfire as adults talk — and sometimes bicker — about what they think is best for students. Unlike most of those adults, however, Haile and Quimbo must return to school and live with the consequences of the decisions the board makes.

The Scene met with the students just an hour before a particularly heated meeting at which the board voted to lift the district’s mask mandate after spring break — a move that both students advised against.

Haile was born in Ethiopia and Quimbo in the Philippines, but they both grew up in the Davidson County school system. Haile is a junior at Martin Luther King Jr. Magnet High School and Quimbo is a senior at Hillwood High.

YOU’VE SAT IN SOME PRETTY HEATED BOARD MEETINGS — WHAT HAS THAT BEEN LIKE FOR YOU? Abenezer Haile: I think it’s very interesting.

IS THERE SOMETHING THAT YOU WISH

ABENEZER HAILE AND ANGELIE QUIMBO

ADULTS WOULD UNDERSTAND ABOUT THE STUDENT EXPERIENCE? AH: The perfect way to, I think, answer that is — from both sides you have to have the ability to empathize [with] the side that you’re talking to. So for example, if you’re a student, and you see a lot of decisions made by your administration, or you see your parents making decisions that you might not be agreeing with, you still have to be able to empathize and see what direction they’re coming from. And it’s the exact same thing with parents too. If your child isn’t, for example, getting the grades that you would expect them to get, it doesn’t automatically mean that you have to set restrictions on them, like, “I’m going to take your phone.” You should also be able to have that ability to say, “OK, what’s happening in their lives that I can put myself in and try to understand?” So I think the highlighted key

vocab is — try to empathize.

AQ: Maybe the saying that parents always know best, or have the best interest for their kids — I’m not completely on board with that being 100 percent true. Again, like what Abenezer said, there has to be a sense of empathy both ways. I know that it comes from a place of privilege saying that; I have a really stable relationship with my parents, and I know that not every student has that. …

But being able to communicate with your kids, being able to communicate with your parents, especially about grades or mental health or what’s going on in school, is really important.

And if I could tell one thing to parents … just check in with your kids and don’t walk into your conversation with your child thinking that you know everything that’s going on, because you may not. And it may take time for a student or even a parent to open up to one another, and it’s just about trust and time.

PHOTO: DANIEL MEIGS

In the heat of the moment, you might see a person say something that you’re not completely in agreement with. But you also have the ability to observe the beauty of democracy, so anybody can come up and say whatever opinion that they have, as long as they do it respectfully. So like I said, in that moment, you’re [thinking], “What are they saying?” if you don’t agree, or if you do agree if you’re like … “This person is saying the perfect thing.” But then after we leave and you reflect on the meeting that you just experienced, you get to understand that what you saw was the play of democracy in action.

Angelie Quimbo: I will say that I’ve had my fair share of parents or people in the community coming after me. … I guess me being 18, I’m seen as an adult and that justifies, like, “I can personally attack your views.” In my opinion that’s not really a quality argument. … It’s not going toward anything. It’s basically saying, “Your view is wrong, and I’m right.” And that doesn’t really sit right with me. … But taking that into consideration as student board members, I think it’s important for us to be exposed to different views, different opinions, especially from our community, because that’s the people we represent.

HAS THE CENSORSHIP PROMPTED YOU TO SEEK OUT MORE INFORMATION ON YOUR OWN? AH: Yeah. … The irony behind it is, by you actively saying “Students can’t learn this,” … you’re advertising it. Especially with the books that they’re banning.

AQ: With that [legislation], students are actively looking up “What is CRT?” and thus getting more exposure to those in-depth conversations or in-depth resources.

HAS YOUR EXPERIENCE AS A STUDENT BOARD REP SHAPED WHAT YOU WANT TO DO MOVING FORWARD? AH: Definitely. Yeah. You get to see how you can directly … influence people’s lives. … The policies that they pass at the board meetings, it’s very different from the policies that are passed at the federal level. So at the federal level, it takes a long time to actually affect someone’s life. With this, if something happens on Tuesday, it’s gonna affect the student’s life on Wednesday. It shows you how important, but also underrated, the municipal-level government is.

AQ: I’ve always been really interested in governmental structures, and the board is a governmental entity in itself in a way, governing the different schools in the district. It’s really interesting seeing policies get passed and different things like that, that you don’t really get to see as a normal student. ■

nashvillescene.com | MARCH 3 – MARCH 9, 2022 | NASHVILLE SCENE

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2/28/22 6:00 PM

READING NEWSPAPER HEADLINES

BY SHEEREA YU

PHOTO: ERIC ENGLAND

I. i always thought democracy was guaranteed, i took it for granted, i thought if i worked hard i could make it in white man’s christian america, but now i see the pot shaking on the stove, and i find i cannot raise my voice over the sound of seething.

SHEEREA YU

Meet the Nashville Youth Poet Laureate University School of Nashville junior Sheerea Yu hopes her poetry will effect change

BY ERICA CICCARONE WHEN SHEEREA YU stepped onto the stage at the Nashville Youth Poet Laureate semifinals, she had never read a poem aloud to an audience before. Later on in December, she did it again at Southern Word’s annual State of the Word regional poetry showcase. The event showcases the talented youth involved in the spoken-word education and youth-development organization’s programming. It’s also the stage where poets compete to be the city’s next laureate. Yu won the competition with her poem “reading newspaper headlines,” which you can read on the right.

Now in its eighth year, the Nashville Youth Poet Laureate is a joint program of Southern Word, Metro Nashville and national youth literary-arts organization Urban Word.

The Youth Poet Laureate program’s goal is to include youth perspectives in civic dialogue because “teens are uniquely positioned to remind us of our commitments to our children, to our future, and to our shared ideals.”

Youth Poet Laureates perform at functions like Metro Council meetings and the mayor’s State of Metro address, as well as at cultural events throughout the city.

Yu says she surprised herself by getting up on that stage, but talking with her, it’s easy to perceive her courage and motivation. The Scene asked Yu about the role of poetry in her life, what we should know about teens today and more.

DID YOU START WITH WRITING POETRY OR WITH POETRY PERFORMANCE? I feel like I sort of fell into everything. I don’t want to say [it was] a calling at all. But sometimes I see something happening. I’m like, “Oh, I don’t like that.” And I get this phrase or this image that stays in my mind after. And I write it down, and I turn those scraps into poems sometimes. So I found [former Youth Poet Laureates] Marie Shields and Alora Young — I’m like, big fans of them, but they don’t know I exist.

I found their performances and poems online. I was like, “Whoa, this is such a cool program. You don’t really share your poetry very much.” Before this, my family didn’t really get to read anything I’d ever written. It was a surprise for me that I applied to this and I got into

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performance. At the semifinals that day, it was the first time I ever tried doing spoken word or reading something that I had written. It felt really right. ... I always thought poetry should be something that comments on society — that makes a point about racism or something like that.

That day, I was really happy that I had unlocked this skill or leveled up or whatever. I was like, “Yeah, it’s really important for you to be able to actually present what you write. Because society needs that.”

WHAT ROLE HAS POETRY BEEN PLAYING IN YOUR LIFE? I think it’s made me a little more aware. Like, I’m always thinking, “Could I turn this into a piece that could alleviate this social problem? Is what my friends are talking about, what they’re crying in the bathroom about, what they’re living through — is that something that is important that I could potentially make a difference in a way?” I think I’m always looking around now for scraps of images and things like that.

WHAT DO YOU THINK IT MEANS FOR A YOUNGER PERSON TO HAVE A VOICE? I don’t know what it means to have a voice. I don’t know. I think everyone has one. And when I was reading through the questions [you sent before our interview], I thought about this in conjunction with the last question [about what I want people to know about teenagers today]. It’s that teenagers do have a voice. They might be the people overlooked, but we care a lot. We’re doing things.

WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING FORWARD TO ABOUT YOUR POSITION AS YOUTH POET LAUREATE? I think the main thing is a series of performances. But also I was talking with Ben [Smith, director of Southern Word] about maybe working on a poetry collection. I love interviewing people for the [University School] newspaper. I just love talking to different kinds of people and learning their stories. So I would love to try and write a poetry collection from the perspectives of different people. … [Ben] told me that you step into the position [of Youth Poet Laureate] and who you are shapes the role.

WHAT ELSE DO YOU WANT OUR READERS TO KNOW ABOUT TEENAGERS IN 2022? I keep thinking about a line from one of Alora’s poems. … It was about our generation, and it answers all the questions of what we should know about teenagers. But my favorite line was like, “Prejudice is no match for Google Translate.” And I just thought that was so perfect, because I think we’re growing up with different ideas of diversity and LGBTQ [life] and social norms. I feel like that changes so much. Like our lens of how we view the world ... with social media, you see a lot of things changing, but also I feel like there’s more teenagers than ever who can get to that activist point.

Because with technology, we know how to reach more people than ever. I always felt like I grew up knowing that. If there was something I wanted to say, there would be a way to get it out there to do it. ■

II. my classmate says, these killings should have been a bigger deal. he is angry, and i feel so embarrassingly grateful and relieved, that people of other races would care about stopasianhate because i know white supremacy is not the only supremacy, and even the word-asian. do you know how much history and identity is between those countries, who would never think they could ever fit together. certainly not into just one word. yet i stay silent. on some level, i feel i have no jurisdiction over pride and protest, i am consumed by self-doubt. when it is the people who look like me murdered, why do i feel the urge to look away? i cannot stand how my face could result in the pattering of gunfire.

III. embrace this conflict. as a reflection of facing issues rather than burying them, better to roar and rage than dejected acceptance, i promise in countries where everyone looks the same racism never has the chance to bubble to the surface. diversity is a powerful heat. i say it is better to feel its burn than let racism simmer, kept to dinner table murmurings. only with it can we work, can we challenge racism, can we turn the heat dial until the water finally boils. clear and sure, cleansed. our knees ache from standing by the stovetop, but therethe sudden rush of quiet, and that moment of held breath.

NASHVILLE SCENE | MARCH 3 – MARCH 9, 2022 | nashvillescene.com

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Student Essay Contest

Read a piece by the winner of our inaugural student essay contest, presented with The Porch Writers’ Collective For the Scene’s inaugural Student Issue, we wanted to hear from a pretty important contingent of Nashvillians — students themselves. And so we opened up our very first student essay contest to kids from high schools across Davidson County with the offer of a cash prize and this prompt: It’s no secret that a lot has changed in the past few years. The way we act and interact out in public, at school, and even at home has changed. On the other hand, some experiences, like mowing the lawn or reading a book, might seem exactly the same. That’s why we want to check in and see what life is like right now, from your point of view.

Think of this essay contest as a time capsule full of moments. What moment of your life would you add to this shared record of our moment in time? We are equally interested in moments that are big or small, personal or political, challenging or fun, mundane or new. If an experience matters to you, it will matter to us.

From our diverse pool of entrants, we selected as our winner Mackenzie N. Bransford, a senior at Nashville School of the Arts. Read Mackenzie’s essay below, and read essays by our two runners-up — Hume-Fogg junior Isa Cruz and NSA junior Walt Robinson — at nashvillescene.com.

Special thanks to the team at The Porch Writers’ Collective for helping us reach out to Nashville high school students: Joseph Kane, Susannah Felts, Katie McDougall and Metro Nashville School Board representative Emily Masters.

LIVE MUSIC | URBAN WINERY | RESTAURANT | BAR | PRIVATE EVENTS LOW TICKE T ALERT

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3.05 Aural Fixation

Al Stewart

With His Band The Empty Pockets

Live Music & Poetry Presents: Matters of the Heart - A Red & Black Affair

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Donna The Buffalo

THE SPADEFOOT TOAD

BY MACKENZIE N. BRANSFORD

THERE IS A VERY SPHERICAL ANIMAL found in deserts during their wet season called the spadefoot toad. He is a small thing, ranging from 1 to 3 inches, and he is decorated along his body with red stripes, hanging against his skin like garlands from the rafters of a home in winter. This little thing can teach us a lot about emotional survival through isolation.

During the pandemic, I felt that I lost somebody inside myself. She died silently, without any funeral. I lost a girl who danced.

Who painted her nails, made her bed in the morning, lit candles at night.

I became somebody who stared obsessively into the disastrously dark space that exists between every human and the world around them, the space that bullies people into a survival mindset that intermittently allows all the beautiful little things to bleed away. Trapped by a violent limbo solely of my own creation, everything ceased to be anything.

Color bled from details of life I once loved. Strawberries ceased to taste sweet.

Songs I loved began to fade, movies I watched lost moral meaning. If there was a pit inside of me this large, if there was a purgatory on this earth this painful — what was the purpose of interacting with these moments at all? Everything clouded out.

In an attempt to find a natural connection to my smothering emotions that felt so unnatural, I learned about the similarities between humans and the spadefoot toad.

During dry desert seasons, he disappears 5 to 10 feet into the ground to obtain moisture from the dirt until the surface becomes habitable. He can stay down there for up to a decade. The world around him dissipates; he understands what he must do to survive.

Humans frequently learn from nature in ways we cannot learn from one another, and the spadefoot toad understands selfpreservation more than any human ever

with Jeverson

3.10

The Young Fables “Pages” Album Release Show

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Kevin Griffin

SUCH

of Better Than Ezra

will — it’s not a form of death, it’s not proof of inherent impermanence. We mourn the people we were before, we cut our hair and tape strands of it into notebooks. We let our fingernails grow out like tree rings, forcing a state of permanence — as without it there is an all-encompassing sense of loss. Two years of pandemic caused me to consider — we only sink deeper into ourselves. When the world is dry and we need someplace safe to go, the damp caverns of our own hearts embrace us. Maybe the girl who existed in all those details isn’t dead, but rather finding her way toward the surface.

I experienced an isolated adolescence.

Because of this, the moments in my life seemed meaningless. But as I begin to shake the dirt from my eyes, moments hit me with a sharp, unflinching force. It makes me realize how, at times, we must allow ourselves to sink. We must allow the surface to become habitable, allowing the ground to take care of us until we can begin our journey back up. ■

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BMI PRESENTS STEVE DORFF & FRIENDS

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WRABEL WITH MADI DIAZ, TENILLE TOWNES, CAM, JAMIE FLOYD & MORE

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OLETA ADAMS

LADYSMITH BLACK MAMBAZO

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AHI IN THE LOUNGE

NASHVILLE BEATLES BRUNCH FEATURING FOREVER ABBEY ROAD

3.19

THE MOODY BLUES’ JOHN LODGE

TIME OUT TOUR FT. KIM RICHEY, BETH NIELSEN CHAPMAN, MAIA SHARP & THE ACCIDENTALS

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INEBRIATED SHAKESPEARE PRESENTS: HAMLET IN THE LOUNGE

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CRASH TEST DUMMIES WITH MO KENNEY

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OZ NOY TRIO FEATURING DENNIS CHAMBERS & JIMMY HASLIP

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EDWIN MCCAIN WITH ALYSSA LAZAR

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SKYLINE SESSIONS IN THE LOUNGE FEATURING SWEET JOSEPHINE & ZOE CUMMINS

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GILBERT O’SULLIVAN

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JERRY JOSEPH IN THE LOUNGE

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MARCH 9 · 13 · 22

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Banned Book Roundup

action, the KKK, gang violence, interracial relationships and media representation.

I went to a less-than-diverse high school, and it would have been impactful for me to see the processing of these topics play out in Dear Martin’s pages. Even for an adult reader, it’s powerful to experience the point of view of a kid hearing about other kids who look like him being killed.

Certain adults don’t want students reading these books — so put them on your reading list

incubating its babies seemed too genderfluid to some parents of first-graders — particularly the right-wing Williamson County group Moms for Liberty. But it’s really just science. This book answers how baby seahorses are made — just a nugget of information for a very curious age group.

BY HANNAH HERNER WHEN A BOOK is banned, shunned or removed from a school district’s curriculum, it often says more about the setting than it does about the reading material itself. The books listed below have recently entered the news because vocal parents in Tennessee and throughout the South have objected to them being taught in schools, or even simply being available in school libraries.

Students can still find them in public libraries and bookstores — so kids, you can make the call for yourself.

MIDDLE SCHOOL/HIGH SCHOOL BOOKS MAUS BY ART SPIEGELMAN Removed from McMinn County curriculum To read a graphic novel as a school assignment has to be something special for students. It’s too bad that Maus, a story of surviving the Holocaust based on the author’s own father’s story, won’t be included in the school curriculum in McMinn County, which made national headlines for its objections to the book January. But the controversy also catapulted Maus to the top of the Amazon bestseller list, and prompted extensive media coverage, especially around International Holocaust Rememberance Day. Author Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel shows reverence for the experiences of our elders that young people would be wise to explore. In this way, the book still gets to serve its purpose.

WALK TWO MOONS BY SHARON CREECH Removed from Williamson County curriculum This was easily my favorite book that I read in school — in fifth grade, to be exact.

Walk Two Moons’ protagonist, Sal, tells a story about her close friend in a way that I longed to emulate, and had a first kiss that I thought about for years. Seeing Sal navigate losing her mother and then her grandmother and find meaning and peace in it all soothed my anxious brain. What stuck with me more than the heavy themes — the book was removed for its “emotional resonation” — was the Native American proverb for which Sharon Creech named her book: “Don’t judge a man until you’ve walked two moons in his moccasins.”

FEELINGS BY ALIKI BRANDENBERG

DRAGONWINGS BY LAURENCE YEP Removed from Blount County curriculum Dragonwings is inspired by the true story of a Chinese immigrant who made a flying machine in 1909. It follows 8-year-old Moon Shadow and his family members as they hang onto their traditions amid racism and poverty in San Francisco, and depicts the special bonds that exist between Moon Shadow and his male family members. It’s banned from the curriculum in a county that is just 1 percent Asian — now students have one less opportunity to learn something about Chinese culture. This book allows readers to remember how America can give new opportunities to immigrants, but it can also make life so difficult.

Teachers were asked to do additional teaching about happiness to counteract the more “negative” emotions mentioned in Aliki Brandenburg’s Feelings. I love the way these adorable comic scenes give examples of situations where kids feel jealous, lonely, angry, sad and more. It has aged very well, and recently came to mind as I stared blankly at my therapist, who was asking me to name my emotions.

CHILDREN’S BOOKS DISPUTED, ALTERED OR TAKEN OFF CURRICULUM IN WILLIAMSON COUNTY SEA HORSE: THE SHYEST FISH IN THE SEA BY CHRISTINE BUTTERWORTH This book’s description of a male seahorse

DEAR MARTIN BY NIC STONE Removed from curriculum in multiple Southern school districts In Nic Stone’s Dear Martin, a 17-yearold Black boy becomes the victim of racial profiling — it’s unfortunately an all too common conflict in the real world.

Narrator Justyce takes a pledge to be more like Martin Luther King Jr., and he and his friends, both Black and white, have conversations about racism in America. I like that the book doesn’t shy away from conversations on affirmative

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SEPARATE IS NEVER EQUAL: SYLVIA MENDEZ AND HER FAMILY’S FIGHT FOR DESEGREGATION BY DUNCAN TONATIUH I learned something new about history from this book about a trial that sought to desegregate California schools seven years before Brown v. Board of Education. The truth of what Williamson County Schools sought to cut out, about a superintendent with racist views, is an important one.

What an opportunity this book presents to educate kids in the schools of today, which are increasingly resegregated by race and socioeconomic class.

EMAIL EDITOR@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

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AN EVENING OF FIRSTS Feat. World Premiere of Winger’s Symphony No. 1 March 17 to 19

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medieval epic from 2021, Scene film critic Jason Shawhan put it best when he said it’s “awesome in a way that will piss off a lot of people.” Based on the 14th-century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the film follows the callow Gawain (Dev Patel) as he goes on a quest to confront his titular foe.

He takes some odd, surreal detours throughout his journey, from helping a ghost retrieve her severed head to trying to fend off the advances of a way-too-friendly lord and lady (Joel Edgerton and Alicia Vikander). It is quite the visually imaginative spectacle, but it can also get baffling and befuddling — even hardcore medieval-fantasy fans might end up as lost and confused as our protagonist. Ultimately, this acid-Arthurian flick is yet another Lowery film in which a guy goes through one long, strange trip in order to discover who he truly is. Pavneet Aulakh, senior lecturer in English at Vanderbilt University, will present the film, which — like all screenings in Vanderbilt’s International Lens series — is free to attend. 7:30 p.m. at Sarratt Cinema, 2301 Vanderbilt Place

THURSDAY, MARCH 3 The Ryman

[WHAT’S GOING ON]

YOLA W/ALLISON RUSSELL & DEVON GILFILLIAN

Here’s a two-night bill featuring three young singers who seek to modernize R&B. I don’t necessarily hear much soul music in the work of U.K.-born, Nashville-based singer Yola, whose 2021 album Stand for Myself garnered good reviews and attracted a legion of fans who lean toward the Americana genre. By my definition, soul comes out of gospel music, while Yola sings in a folkish style that brings to mind, say, the work of ’80s New Wave-meets-R&B singer Joan Armatrading. Stand for Myself sports production by esteemed blues-rocker Dan Auerbach, which means the album’s “Break the Bough” amounts to a recasting of fouron-the-floor ’60s R&B, like the stuff labels like Motown and Westbound released back then. It’s unfailingly positive music. Appear-

ing with Yola on Thursday at the Ryman will be Allison Russell, who broke through last year on the strength of a confessional folkrock collection, Outside Child. Like Yola, Russell doesn’t seem particularly interested in musical innovation, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Her music is a hybrid that allows her to tell her stories, which are often harrowing, on Outside Child. On Friday, another Nashville singer, Devon Gilfillian, opens for Yola. His 2020 album Black Hole Rainbow suggests he has a future as an Americana-ized R&B vocalist, and he released a track-by-track version of Marvin Gaye’s 1971 album What’s Going On in the same year. 7:30 p.m. March 3-4 at the Ryman, 116 Rep. John Lewis Way N. EDD HURT FILM

MUSIC

THURSDAY / 3.03

[IT’S NOT EASY BEING GREEN]

INTERNATIONAL LENS: THE GREEN KNIGHT

When it comes to writer-director David Lowery’s downright hallucinatory

As much as I enjoy the pristine acoustics and atmosphere of a formal concert hall, there’s something to be said for experiencing beautiful music in a more relaxed setting. Nashville Opera has a number of free community performances coming up that celebrate the art form in a fun, accessible way. For example, the popular Opera Out Loud series returns to Plaza Mariachi on Thursday, providing an entertaining program of familiar scenes and romantic arias.

You can also catch them at The Parthenon on March 12; the concert is free with site admission. And if you’re looking to introduce your little ones to the world of opera, you can check out John Davies’ lively Goldie B. Locks and the Three Singing Bears — a family-friendly, 40-minute production, which is sung in English and features the music of Mozart and Offenbach. (Visit nashvilleopera.org for Goldie B. Locks performance dates and venues.) 7 p.m. at Plaza Mariachi, 3955 Nolensville Pike AMY STUMPFL

ERICA CICCARONE [POPS LIFE]

NASHVILLE SYMPHONY’S POPS SPECTACULAR

I’m always fascinated by those who say they’re intimidated by classical music.

After all, this music has long been a part of popular culture, providing familiar [IN A BIG COUNTRY] soundtracks to many of our favorite AUTHOR EVENT: QIAN JULIE films, television shows, cartoons WANG and more. (Who could forget ElIn 1994, author Qian Julie mer Fudd belting out his battle Wang and her parents moved cry of “Kill da wabbit!” to the from Zhong Gui, China, VISIT NASHVILLESCENE.COM strident tune of “The Ride of to Brooklyn. Her moving TO READ OUR REVIEW OF THE BATMAN, the Valkyries”?) Beginning memoir Beautiful Country IN THEATERS MARCH 4.

Thursday night, you can revisit recalls her early life as an some of the most recognizable undocumented child living musical moments as Nashville in poverty in America, when Symphony presents its Pops Specher family “spent those years tacular at the Schermerhorn. Maestro shrouded in darkness while wresGiancarlo Guerrero leads the symphony in a tling with hope and dignity.” It is also the huge program of hits, including Bernstein’s story of her parents. In his youth, her uncle Overture to Candide; Dukas’ The Sorcerer’s “naïvely, heroically, stupidly” penned and Apprentice; Strauss’ On the Beautiful Blue distributed an essay critical of Chairman BOOKS

PHOTO: JOSEPH ROSS SMITH

YO L A

[LOUD AND PROUD]

OPERA OUT LOUD

Mao, condemning himself to a life behind prison walls and his family to decades of humiliation and violence. Wang shouldered the burdens of her parents and experienced an ever-widening gap with them as she struggled to assimilate into American youth culture. The book’s accolades include mentions in The New York Times, NPR and Barack Obama’s best books of 2021 list. Wang’s experience bears out in her profession: She is an attorney in New York, and her practice prioritizes providing legal representation for underprivileged communities. She is also the founder and leader of the Jews of Color chapter at her synagogue. The virtual event presented in part by Nashville’s Gordon Jewish Community Center will be moderated by Ben Tran, professor of Asian Studies and English at Vanderbilt University. 6 p.m. streaming via nashvillejcc.org

CLASSICAL

MUSIC

CRAIG D. LINDSEY

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CRITICS’ PICKS

BOOKS MUSIC

PARQUET COURTS

MUSIC

FRIDAY / 3.04 [MAKE IT FUNKY]

PARQUET COURTS

My favorite tracks on Parquet Courts’ 2021 full-length Sympathy for Life definitely allude to — or imitate — funk music, a genre that basically began when James Brown and his band created sharp new angles and patterns on 1967’s “Cold Sweat.” Of course, funk has since been recast, chopped and screwed, and popularized via the efforts of such disparate bands as Talking Heads, Can and — you guessed it — Parquet Courts. So it makes sense that “Trullo” and “Marathon of Anger” sound something like deconstructed tracks by another group of funk pioneers, The Meters.

The other stuff on Sympathy goes back and forth between modified funk and a variation on garage rock that often sounds like, say, Primal Scream’s 2015 album Screamadelica. “Just Shadows” rolls along in 3/4 time, as if Parquet Courts decided to lurk in the space that Television and The Grateful Dead share. The minimalist music they achieve on Sympathy carries a message that seems political, as on the title track and “Application/ Apparatus,” both of which posit New York as a center of energy that has been affected

by COVID and other economic forces that the band’s rhythms seek to counter with, you know, something you might call fun. Opening will be Tuareg guitarist and singer Mdou

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Moctar. 8 p.m. at Cannery Ballroom, 1 Cannery Row EDD HURT [HIVE MIND]

SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE

It’s been three years since acid-damaged Philadelphia trio Spirit of the Beehive opened for Ride at Exit/In and left the GenX shoegazers’ fans wondering what exactly they’d just heard. On Friday, the group returns to the Rock Block — this time as headliners. Spirit’s fourth and latest LP, 2021’s Entertainment, Death, doesn’t come out and take the listener by the hand, but instead nestles unorthodox hooks inside gnarled, jangly sound collages that encourage repeated plays to peel back more of its layers. Fans of Canadian post-punk cult faves Women and Animal Collective’s early fourtrack experiments will pick up what they’re putting down. Fellow Keystone Stater Christopher Taylor, alias Body Meat — not to be confused with Californian fuzz-rockers Meatbodies — supports. 8 p.m. at Exit/In, 2208 Elliston Place CHARLIE ZAILLIAN

[HIGH AND LONESOME]

THE DEL McCOURY BAND

How do you make music with the same fundamental elements sound fresh and vital for six decades and counting? You might ask bluegrass standard-bearer Del McCoury. The singer, songwriter and guitarist, who celebrated his 83rd birthday in February, has worked consistently to gently expand the sound of the music and its audience. His band has been a staple of multigenre festival bills for decades, he’s played a big role in sharing the music across the jam-band ecosystem, and he’s won award after award doing it — from Grammys to IBMA honors to a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. The Del McCoury Band’s newest album Almost Proud, released Feb. 18, puts the emphasis squarely on vibrant stringband playing and old-school songwriting.

Recently written songs in the bunch don’t feel out of place next to “Rainbow of My Dreams,” which McCoury told Billboard he’d first heard Lester Flatt perform in the 1940s. Saturday night is your chance to catch McCoury and his time-honored family band not far from home, down at The Caverns. 7 p.m. at The Caverns, 555 Charlie Roberts Road, Pelham, Tenn. STEPHEN TRAGESER

SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE

[JUST DUET]

DOLLY PARTON AND JAMES PATTERSON VIRTUAL BOOK LAUNCH

I love an unexpected duo. Dolly Parton and the prolific thriller writer James Patterson co-wrote a book called Run, Rose, Run, and they’re kicking off a monthlong virtual book tour with a virtual stop at Nashville’s Parnassus Books. The book, which is a Nashville-based thriller, is about an upand-coming singer-songwriter who’s on the run and “determined to do whatever it takes to survive.” And, of course, Dolly wrote a soundtrack to go with it. Parnassus says the event will include a special guest moderator, which is hard to imagine given how star-studded this thing is already. 6:30 p.m. streaming via Parnassus AMANDA HAGGARD

MONDAY / 3.07 [EMO BOYS]

THURSDAY, CURSIVE, JEREMY ENIGK & THE APPLESEED CAST

Former bookish, introspective, gloomy teens who are now of a certain age: Gird yourselves. The artists who made it easier to argue that emo was a vital genre rather than just endless quartets of screaming sad boys are coming to Brooklyn Bowl. Included on the bill is a man who has as good a claim as anyone to be the progenitor of emo: Jeremy Enigk, the frontman of Sunny Day Real Estate and its various spinoffs. And there’s a straight-ish line between SDRE and the other three bands set to perform. The Appleseed Cast was an essential member of the Midwest emo movement, though their second album, Mare Vitalis, stretched the limits of the genre into post-rock, particularly with its sprawling seven-minute centerpiece “Storms.” Cursive was one of the more critically beloved members of the oft-derided genre, especially after 2003’s concept album The Ugly Organ, which featured unusual instrumentation for the idiom (a cello, a trombone) and plenty of backing help from Jenny Lewis. Top of the bill is Thursday, who has never left the consciousness of those aforementioned gloomy teens — especially as long as they’ve still got 2001’s Full Collapse digitally, since the album’s opener “A0001” will invariably play any time Apple Music opens due to its inevitable position as the first track alphabetically (or so I’ve heard). They’re often as atmospheric as the rest of the bands on the bill, and frontman Geoff Rickly can still scream it out with the best of them. 7 p.m. at Brooklyn Bowl, 925 Third Ave. N. J.R. LIND MUSIC

Danube, waltz, Opus 314; Ravel’s Boléro; Offenbach’s Overture to Orpheus in the Underworld; Wagner’s “The Ride of the Valkyries” from Die Walküre; Rossini’s Overture to Guillaume Tell (William Tell); Tchaikovsky’s 1812, Ouverture solennelle (Solemn Overture), Opus 49. March 3-6 at the Schermerhorn, 1 Symphony Place AMY STUMPFL

MUSIC

PHOTO: POONEH GHANA

Celebrating dogs should be a daily practice.

For those of us with dogs, they give us so much: companionship, doofy smiles and that thing where they kick their leg when you scratch the right spot. Saturday is the 10th anniversary of Old Friends Dog Sanctuary, and they’ll be paying homage to all the pups (and staff) who’ve passed through the nonprofit. The event is part meet-and-greet, part book event. While you’re there doling out scritches, you can grab a copy of Homecoming Tales: 15 Inspiring Stories From Old Friends Senior Dog Sanctuary, which showcases the stories of just some of the senior dogs and how they found their forever homes. 2 p.m. at Parnassus Books, 3900 Hillsboro Pike AMANDA HAGGARD

BOOKS

[FOREVER AND EVER, AMEN]

OLD FRIENDS SENIOR DOG SANCTUARY CELEBRATES HOMECOMING TALES: 15 INSPIRING STORIES

SUNDAY / 3.06

MUSIC

SATURDAY / 3.05

[NO COUNTRY FOR NUMAN]

GARY NUMAN

A fundamental figure in the arenas of synth-pop, post-punk, New Wave, electronic, goth, industrial and all points corresponding on the map of alternative rock, Gary Numan achieved legend status even before his 1979 single “Cars” became one of the most endearing “one-hits” of the ’80s.

Both as singer of Tubeway Army and with his early solo records, Numan was using modern technology to make cold-and-fuzzy music about modern technology making for the death of mankind on essentials like

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DOWNTOWN

Saturday, March 5

Sunday, March 20

SONGWRITER SESSION

LIVE IN CONCERT

Waylon Payne

Graham Nash

NOON – 12:45 pm · FORD THEATER

7:30 pm · CMA THEATER

Saturday, March 12

Saturday, March 26

SONGWRITER SESSION

SONGWRITER SESSION

Stephanie Quayle and Anna Vaus

Acoustic Guitar Project

NOON – 12:45 pm · FORD THEATER

NOON – 12:45 pm · FORD THEATER

Saturday, March 19

Saturday, April 2

SONGWRITER SESSION

SONGWRITER SESSION

Ryan Larkins

Teddy Robb

NOON – 12:45 pm · FORD THEATER

NOON – 12:45 pm · FORD THEATER

Saturday, March 19

Saturday, April 2

POETS AND PROPHETS

LIVE ON STAGE

Rodney Crowell

Love, Tom

2:30 pm · FORD THEATER

Featuring Tom Douglas

2:30 pm · FORD THEATER

Check our calendar for a full schedule of upcoming programs and events.

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CRITICS’ PICKS

MARK BISH.

Jazz, Rock, Blues, Country, Fusion, Funk, Flamenco, etc. Technique, theory, songwriting. Programs available. 40 years exp.

512-619-3209

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What’s great about Philadelphia-born R&B singer Jazmine Sullivan is her ability to fuse neo-soul and modernistic hip-hop. On her 2008 debut album Fearless, tracks like “Need U Bad” and “Bust Your Windows” come across like classic pop, and her lyrics describe the inner world of an ambitious singer and songwriter who doesn’t let her penchant for control overpower her sense of humor. Her 2021 release Heaux Tales finds Sullivan taking her music into new territory. Writing about Heaux Tales, music critic Alfred Soto summed up its appeal: “Rushing through syllables, then scrunching to a halt for a surprise stress, Sullivan hits a new peak as a vocalist.”

That’s true, and Soto goes on to question the format of Heaux Tales, which incorporates several brief interludes along with superb tunes like “Put It Down” and “The Other Side.” He may be right, and Sullivan may do even better work when she takes her concept and expands it further. Still, I can’t think of a stronger — and more challenging — song about self-determination than “The

MUSIC

with former Musicians Institute and Austin Guitar School instructor

[RESPECT YOURSELF]

JAZMINE SULLIVAN

[BLOUNT FORCE]

JAKE BLOUNT

MUSIC

GUITAR LESSONS

MUSIC

TUESDAY / 3.08

MODERN COLOR

Jake Blount is a true multihyphenate artist, earning fans and acclaim for his singing and banjo and fiddle playing, as well as work as an ethnomusicologist and writer.

Blount’s disciplines find divine intersection in his work, like his most recent album Spider Tales, a fascinating collection of songs Blount discovered while researching the music of Black and Indigenous communities in the Appalachian region, and which features top-notch playing by some of old-time and string-band music’s most exciting young musicians. Look for a masterful performance from Blount — who won 2020’s Steve Martin Banjo Prize — as well as a wealth of insight into what’s sure to be a oneof-a-kind set list. 8 p.m. at the Station Inn, 402 12th Ave. S. BRITTNEY McKENNA [MODERNITY FRATERNITY]

San Pedro, Calif., four-piece Modern Color hails from The Minutemen’s hometown.

But in lieu of local minimalist post-punk traditions, Modern Color takes a more contemplative, cinematic alternative-rock tack. Think ’90s L.A. gloom-gazers Failure, or contemporaries like Indiana’s Cloakroom and Nashville’s own Tape Deck Mountain, and you’re getting close. Last year’s four-song Now Life Is Living You EP is the group’s latest. 7 p.m. at Drkmttr, 1111 Dickerson Pike CHARLIE ZAILLIAN

WEDNESDAY / 3.09 [HARMONIC RESONANCE]

LADYSMITH BLACK MAMBAZO

Elder millennials like myself probably heard South African vocal group Ladysmith Black Mambazo for the first time on Paul Simon’s 1986 career-redefining hit Graceland. The group’s contributions to that record put the international spotlight

MUSIC

Other Side.” It’s about the ultimate pop goal of autonomy, but Sullivan yearns to move to Atlanta, where a rich man will give her the things she needs to thrive. Can you become a soccer mom and stay cool in the suburbs?

Opening will be Tiana Major9. 8 p.m. at Marathon Music Works, 1402 Clinton St. EDD HURT

MUSIC

“Complex,” “Me! I Disconnect From You,” “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?” and “Metal” years before the dystopian dread of albums like Radiohead’s OK Computer. If this makes you wish you could’ve seen Numan in his prime, good news — you still can! His 21st studio album, last year’s stunning Intruder, finds the 63-year-old singer still in his finest voice, robotically crooning with ice-cold indifference about the doom-and-gloom drama of life during a pandemic on standouts like “I Am Screaming,” “Is This World Not Enough” and “It Breaks Me.” On these tracks Numan transcends the electro-rock time continuum. With more contemporarysounding, glitchy electronics and breathy midtempo beats, the sonic textures of these tunes harken back less to those of Numan’s heyday and more to acts he influenced, like Songs of Faith- and Devotion-era Depeche Mode and The Fragile-era Nine Inch Nails.

I Speak Machine will open. 8 p.m. at Basement East, 917 Woodland St. ADAM GOLD

[POP MATTERS]

BILLIE EILISH

In his liner notes for João Gilberto’s self-titled 1973 album, funk-samba experimentalist Arto Lindsay could have been describing the work of pop star Billie Eilish: “His refusal to raise his voice and apparent reduction of all emotions to a sad sweetness ultimately cannot conceal his passion. His reflectiveness and absolutely incomparable breathing can easily distract us from the ferocity of his swing and the harsher aspects of some of the conclusions he reaches.” In his use of syncopation and his ability to recast material in his own image, Gilberto changed music. Meanwhile, Eilish cut a tune titled “Billie Bossa Nova” on her 2021 album Happier Than Ever, a collection that features her downcast, subtle vocals and a variety of musical settings that includes soul, Beatles-style pop and slightly jazzy Peggy Lee-style singing. Her bossa nova song is excellent — some rock fans might not want to believe it, but Eilish draws from the vast universe of pop while remaining bracingly contemporary. Happier Than Ever runs just under an hour, and every track is beguiling, mysterious and intelligently conceived. Eilish is a master of concept, which means her meditations on clueless men and the media’s obsession with body image come across as honest. In 2022, the mass of pop history weighs heavily on anyone who stops to think about what Lindsay said are its harsher implications, and that’s something João Gilberto understood in 1958, when pop meant Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee and early rock ’n’ roll. 7:30 p.m. at Bridgestone Arena, 501 Broadway EDD HURT MUSIC

JAZMINE SULLIVAN

on them, and the expressive beauty of their work is enough reason to see them any chance you get. But there’s a rich history bound up in their extensive catalog, too. Their a cappella choral style is called isicathamiya, and it came from blending newer singing styles with Zulu traditions — a way to carry their culture forward in spite of colonization and industrialization. LBM founder Joseph Shabalala grew up on a farm near the town of Ladysmith. As a teenager in the late 1950s, he left for the big city of Durban, where he found some success singing with the Durban Choir; the group didn’t accept his original compositions, and eventually he returned home. Encouraged by Galiyane Hlatshwayo, leader of a highly regarded isicathamiya group called The Highlanders, Shabalala eventually launched his own group called Ezimnyama, or “The Black Ones.” By the mid-1960s, they’d adopted the name Ladysmith Black Mambazo, or “Ladysmith Black Ax,” reflecting how they routinely cut down their competition in singing contests. Shabalala retired in 2014 and died in 2020; four of his sons are now members of the group, which features nine voices but sounds even bigger. 7:30 p.m. at City Winery, 609 Lafayette St. STEPHEN TRAGESER

[PEN TO PAPER]

MARGO CILKER W/STEPHANIE LAMBRING

Debut records offer an interesting and sometimes contradictory mix of circumstances: It’s the first time for the artist to make a cohesive statement on this scale, and it’s also likely full of material that they’ve been workshopping for a considerable

NASHVILLE SCENE | MARCH 3 – MARCH 9, 2022 | nashvillescene.com

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CRITICS’ PICKS

MARGO CILKER

[TY ONE ON]

TY SEGALL

MUSIC

Though just 34 years old, West Coast garage-psych luminary Ty Segall has crafted a more extensive catalog than most rock ’n’ rollers manage to put together in their entire careers. The master of fuzzy, Sabbathy riffs has issued more than a dozen LPs under his own name, not to mention scads of other projects and collaborations.

The latest of those, digital-release-wise, is his atmospheric, playfully rendered soundtrack for the 2020 crime-reporter documentary Whirlybird. Segall’s latest proper songswith-lyrics LP — last year’s Harmonizer, out via storied indie label Drag City — sees the Laguna Beach native applying warped, melty synthesizers to his characteristically fuzzed-out Stooges-esque rippers to stunning effect. His wife Denée Segall also takes lead vocals on “Feel Good,” a sleek and sexy album standout with a music video to match.

On Wednesday, Segall and his frequent collaborator Charles Moothart will take the stage at Mercy Lounge, with like-minded outfits Silver Synthetic, Country Westerns and Jonathan Stone Phillips playing right next door at The High Watt (more on that below).

Should be a great night for rock ’n’ roll at the Cannery complex. 8 p.m. at Mercy Lounge, 1 Cannery Row D. PATRICK RODGERS [NOT A SPRINT]

SILVER SYNTHETIC W/COUNTRY WESTERNS & JONATHAN STONE PHILLIPS

The particular flavor of psych rock that New Orleans’ Silver Synthetic makes is on

the gentler, folkier side. When frontman Chris Lyons spoke with Scene contributor Charlie Zaillian in the fall, it came up that Lyons’ parents, though supportive of his musical endeavors in general, like this music the best of anything that he’s made so far.

That doesn’t mean it’s for moms and dads only, though. Trying to get by in weird times is an ongoing process, and contemplative, melodic tunes like these are a fine way to keep it up over the long haul. Support comes courtesy of two Nashville artists whose work shares that sensibility. Get there on time for top-notch trio Country Westerns, who released their excellent self-titled album in 2020, as well as Faux Ferocious’ Jonathan Stone Phillips, who’s set to release a new LP of singer-songwriter-oriented material called Out of This World later this year.

8 p.m. at The High Watt, 1 Cannery Row

Cocktails Small Bites Intimate Atmosphere 4210 Charlotte Ave. | 615-678-4086 ottosnashville.com

STEPHEN TRAGESER

EVERGREEN:

THINGS TO DO ANY TIME TV

MUSIC

length of time. Last year, Pacific Northwesterner Margo Cilker released her first fulllength Pohorylle. It’s a showcase for superb storytelling skills and a nimble country-folk band that follows her all around the winding contours of her stories. Every song comes across as a chapter of a story that I want to hear more of, even if it’s about circumstances that no one should have to live through. Wednesday, Cilker drops in at The Basement with support from Music City songsmith Stephanie Lambring, who left the world of Music Row commercial songwriting to focus on her own voice — as both a writer and a singer. A few years later, that journey led to her outstanding 2020 LP Autonomy. 7 p.m. at The Basement, 1604 Eighth Ave. S. STEPHEN TRAGESER

[KNEES AND TOES]

WATCH THE RIGHTEOUS GEMSTONES ON HBO

The previous two television series Danny McBride has created for HBO, the quixotic baseball comedy Eastbound & Down and the conspiratorial hijinks of Vice Principals, are essential documents of the American South — what Faulkner was to the first half of the 20th century and Dolly Parton was to the second half, Danny McBride is to the 21st. While his earlier shows used the Southern cultural landscape as a kind of context and set dressing, The Righteous Gemstones is much more directly about one of the most powerful forces in the region: evangelical Christianity, specifically the gilded, ultra-wealthy, 4K-resolution prosperity gospel of TV preachers. McBride’s surly and stuttering humor is less the focal point than in his previous work, as he cedes much of the show to instantly iconic performances from the likes of John Goodman, Walton Goggins, Adam DeVine and Edi Patterson.

All in one, The Righteous Gemstones — which just aired its Season 2 finale this week — is one of the most gut-busting comedies on television, a clear riff on the prestige primetime soap opera of Succession and Game of Thrones, an astute argument in favor of the separation of church and capitalism, and a little bit of a musical to boot. NADINE SMITH

600 9th 9th Ave Ave SS #100, #100, Nashville, Nashville, TN TN 37203 37203 600

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2/28/22 4:45 PM

S Y THI K ONL E WE

PORTALS: A PERFORMANCE PARTY

Immerse yourself in an unforgettable art bash celebrating feminine power Featuring Sculptures by

VADIS TURNER

Special Guest Artist

ADIA VICTORIA

DJ Set by

ALANNA ROYALE

with Performances by Gardening, Not Architecture, novel. dance, Ciona Rouse, Joi Ware, Jennifer Whitcomb-Oliva

A

MARCH 4 & 5 | 8PM

TICKETS $20

Media Sponsor:

Vincent font

at ozartsnashville.org | 615-350-7200 | 6172 Cockrill Bend Circle

BRAINFOOD EVENT

ALTON BROWN LIVE: BEYOND THE EATS

PRESENTED IN FULL COLOR WITH OCCASIONAL AROMAS / AUDIENCE PARTICIPATION UNDERTAKEN AT OWN RISK

MARCH 17 • TENNESSEE PERFORMING ARTS CENTER TICKETS: TPAC BOX OFFICE | 615-782-4040 | TPAC. ORG ALTONBROWNLIVE. COM

Presented by

The battle is back!

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April 28, 2022 / 6-9:30pm First Horizon Park

IRONFORKNASHVILLE.COM Benefitting 22

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#IronFork22

Summer Camp Camp Summer Guide Guide 2022

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What kind of adventure would you like to go on this summer? Use the codes below to find a camp based on your interests.

A = ADVENTURE DAY CAMPS AR = Arts Day Camps E = EQUESTRIAN CAMPS F = FAITH-BASED CAMPS G = GENERAL DAY

A New Leaf Summer Camp A

7520 Charlotte Pike Nashville TN 37209 560-1533 • http://www. anewleafnashville.org/summer-camp Pip & Pickles Farm 4341 Pecan Valley Road Nashville, TN, 37218

Adventure Science Center A, SI, ST

800 Fort Negley Blvd.

Nashville TN 37203 862-5160 https://www.adventuresci.org/exploreeverything/summer-camp-2022/

Act Too Players Boiler Room Theatre AR

1113 Murfreesboro Road, Ste 119 Franklin TN 37064 294-0667 • https://www.acttooplayers. com/summer-camps

Ann Carroll School of Dance AR

93 Seaboard Lane Suite 201 Franklin TN 37067 790-6468 https://anncarrollschoolofdance.com/ summer-camps-2021/

Annie Moses Summer Music Festival - The Factory at Franklin AR 1110 Harpeth Industrial Ct, Franklin, TN 37064 (615) 905-6251 • https:// anniemosessummermusicfestival.com/

Art Camps with Little Art House AR

2298 Barfield Road Murfreesboro TN 37128 896-3118 https://barfieldschoolofdance.com/ classes.html

Battleground Academy Summer Camps M

336 Ernest Rice Lane Franklin TN 37069 567-8327 https://www.battlegroundacademy. org/student-life/summer-camps

Baylor Summer Program S

171 Baylor School Road Chattanooga TN 37405 423-267-8505 • https://www. baylorschool.org/camps-clubs-clinics

Belle Meade Historic Site Camps M 110 Leake Avenue Nashville TN 37205 356-0501 ext. 148 https://visitbellemeade.com/familyprograms/camps/

Bellevue Performing Arts Center AR 7097 Old Harding Pike, Ste. J Nashville TN 37221 662-8553 • https://www.bellepac.com/ summer-session-camps

Boxwell Reservation Scout Camp S

1260 Creighton Lane Lebanon TN 37087 383-9724 ext. 8234 https://www.mtcbsa.org/campfacilities

2106B Acklen Ave. Nashville TN 37215 933-9644 https://www.littlearthousenashville. com/summer2022

Boys & Girls Club Summer Programs M

Arts Center of Cannon County— Summer Youth Conservatory AR

Brentwood Academy

1424 John Bragg Highway Woodbury TN 37190 563-2787 • https://www.artscenterofcc. com/summeryouthconservatory

Barefoot Republic Camp F

Office Address: 1226 Lakeview Dr. Suite C Franklin TN 37067 599-9683 • https://www.barefootrepublic.org Camp Address: 8824 Brownsford Rd Fountain Run, KY 42133

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Barfield School of Dance AR

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1704 Charlotte Ave., Ste. 200 Nashville TN 37203 983-6836 • https://bgcmt.org/

AR, SP

219 Granny White Pike Brentwood TN 37027 373-0611 • https://summeratba.com

Bridges for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing SI

M = MULTIPLE CAMPS/locations SI = Special Interest Day Camps S = SLEEP AWAY CAMPS SP = Sports day camps ST = STEM Camps Camp Broadstone/Appalachian State University S ASU Box 32042 Boone, NC 38608 828- 262-3045 • https://conferencescamps.appstate.edu/youth-camps

Camp Carolina S

PO Box 919 Brevard, NC 28712 828- 884-2414 https://www.campcarolina.com/

Camp Carson YMCA S

2034 Outer Lake Road Princeton, IN 47670 (812) 385-3597 https://www.campcarson.org/

Camp Country Lad S

204 Union B Road Monterey TN 38574 931-839-2354 (Summer) 931-526-1849 (Winter) http://campcountrylad.com/HTML_ info/info.html

Camp Davis at Gordon Jewish Community Center G

801 Percy Warner Blvd.

Nashville TN 37205 356-7170 https://www.campdavisnashville.com

Camp DeSoto for Girls S

264 Highway Above the Clouds (264 County Rd. 631) Mentone AL 35984 256-634-4394 https://www.campdesoto.com/

Camp Forget Me Not through Alive Hospice SI Camp Site: Camp Widjiwagan 3088 Smith Springs Rd Antioch, TN 37013 963-4732 • https://www.alivehospice. org/news-events/camps/

Camp Green Cove for Girls S 617 Green Cove Rd Zirconia NC 28790 828-692-6355 https://www.greencove.com/

935 Edgehill Ave Nashville TN 37203 248-8828 https://www.bridgesfordeafandhh.org/

Camp Invention M

Camp Bear Track S

Camp Juliette Low S

295 Prim Road Drasco AR 72530 501-825-8222 https://www.campbeartrack.com/

(800) 968-4332 https://www.invent.org/programs/ camp-invention 321 Camp Juliette Low Rd. Cloudland, GA 30731 770-428-1062 • https://cjl.org/

Camps highlighted in a blue bar are advertisers

Camp Laney S

916 West River Road Mentone AL 35984 256-634-4066 https://camplaney.com/

Camp Marymount S

1318 Fairview Blvd.

Fairview TN 37062 799-0410 http://www.campmarymount.com/

Camp Merri-Mac for Girls S 1123 Montreat Road Black Mountain NC 28711 828-669-8766 https://www.merri-mac.com/

Camp Mondamin for Boys S 413 Mondamin Rd. Zirconia NC 28790 828-693-7446 https://www.mondamin.com/

Camp NaCoMe F

3232 Sulphur Creek Road Centerville, TN 37033 931-729-9723 • https://www.nacome. org/find-a-camp-at-nacome-camp

Camp Seafarer (girls) S

2744 Seafarer Road Arapahoe NC 28510 252-249-1212 https://www.seagull-seafarer.org/

Camp Sea Gull (boys) S

218 Sea Gull Landing Arapahoe NC 28510 252-249-1111 https://www.seagull-seafarer.org/

Camp Skyline Ranch for Girls F, S 4888 Alabama Highway 117 Mentone AL 35984 800-448-9279 https://www.campskyline.com/

Camp Smiley Christian Camp F

528 Vance Lane Lebanon TN 37087 444-4254 • https://campsmiley.com/

Camp St. Cecilia G

4210 Harding Pike Nashville TN 37205 293-1625 • https://www.stcecilia.edu/ campus-life/camp-st-cecilia

Camp STEM ST

PO Box 330916 Murfreesboro, TN 37133 415-7963 • https://www.campstem.us/

nashvillescene.com/campguide

2/28/22 6:44 PM

belmont.edu/artcamps

Shaping the next generation of creative minds.

ART & DESIGN SUMMER COURSES FOR TEENS JUNE 6-26

nashvillescene.com | MARCH 3 – MARCH 9, 2022 | NASHVILLE SCENE

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Camp Timberlake for Boys S

1123 Montreat Road, Suite B Black Mountain NC 28711 828-669-8766 https://www.camptimberlake.com/

Camp Twigs at Bells Bend Beaman A, G

4187 W. Old Hickory Blvd.

Nashville TN 37218 856-4772 • https:// leadershipacademyllc.com/camps-list/ camp-twigs/bells-bend-beaman/ Camp Location Thursday & Fridays 4255 Little Marrowbone Rd Nashville, TN 37015

Camp Vesper Point S

3216 Lee Pike Soddy-Daisy TN 37379 423-648-7936 • https://www. vesperpoint.org/summer-registration

Camp Watermelon A

4815 Franklin Pike Nashville TN 37220 298-9583 • https://rec.fpcnashville. org/o-h-day-camp/

Camp Woodmont for Boys & Girls S 381 Moonlight Road Cloudland GA 30731 423-472-6070 https://www.campwoodmont.com/

Centennial Youth Ballet Summer Intensive 2022 AR

Centennial Performing Arts Studios 211 27th Ave N Nashville TN 37203 880-8439 • https://www. friendsofmetrodance.org/events.html

Center for STEM Education for Girls

ST

Harpeth Hall School 3801 Hobbs Rd Nashville TN 37215 297-9543 • https://stem.harpethhall. org/summer-institute

Cheekwood AR

1200 Forrest Park Drive Nashville TN 37205 353-2151 • https://cheekwood.org/ learn/camps-and-classes-2/

Chippewa Ranch Camp for Girls S

8258 Country O Road Eagle River WI 54521 866-209-9322 • https:// chippewaranchcamp.com/dates-rates

Creekside Riding Academy & Stables Summer Day Camp E

2359 Lewisburg Pike Franklin TN 37064 595-7547 https://creeksideridingstables.com/ summer-camps

Cub Creek Science Camp S

16795 Hwy E Rolla MO 65401 573-458-2125 https://cubcreeksciencecamp.com/

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Cub Scout Day Camps G

3414 Hillsboro Pike P.O. Box 150409 Nashville TN 37215 383-9724 https://www.mtcbsa.org/camping

Dance in Bloom AR

8133 Sawyer Brown Road Suite 601 Nashville, TN 37221 662-4819 • https://www.danceinbloom. com/summer

David Deaton Karate Studios Summer Camp SI

Hermitage/Mt. Juliet 1249 N. Mt. Juliet Road Mt. Juliet TN 37122 754-6878 http://www.dojoupdate.com/martialarts-training/summer-karate-camp/

Father Ryan Summer Camps SP

700 Norwood Drive Nashville TN 37204 383-4200 • https://www.fatherryan. org/athletics/summer-camps

Firstlight Art Academy AR

1710 General George Patton Dr. Ste. 108 Brentwood TN 37027 678-6745 • https://firstlightaa.org/ blog/summer-2021/

Franklin Road Academy Summer Camps M

iD Tech Camps SI

AR

Frenchwoods Festival of the Performing Arts S Winter Location 1879 University Dr Coral Springs FL 33071 954-346-7455 https://frenchwoods.com/

502 S.E. Broad St. Murfreesboro TN 37130 890-2300 https://www.explorethedc.org/camps

Summer Location 199 Bouchoux Brook Rd Hancock NY 13783 800-634-1703 https://frenchwoods.com/

Doe River Gorge F

Fuge Life-Changing Camps F

220 Doe River Gorge Rd. Hampton, TN 37658 423-725-4010 • https://www. doerivergorge.com/camps/

Easter Seals Summer Camp Programs M

Various Locations in Tennessee 500 Wilson Circle Pike, Suite 228 Brentwood TN 37027 292-6640 ex 134 https://www.easterseals.com/ tennessee/our-programs/campingrecreation/youth-camps.html

Emagination Computer Camps S Massachusetts, Illinois, Virginia, Connecticut, Georgia, and Pennsylvania 877-248-0206 • https://www. emaginationtechcamps.com/

Ensworth Summer Camp M

High School: 7401 Highway 100 Nashville TN 37221 301-5400 • https://www.ensworth. com/programs/summer-offerings Elementary and Middle Schools: 211 Ensworth Ave. Nashville TN 37205 383-0661

ETC Gymnastics F, SI

1137 Haley Road Murfreesboro TN 37129 867-6900 • https://etcgymnastics. com/%20camps/

Harbor Island Yacht Club at Harbor Drive & Saundersville Road Old Hickory TN 37138 859-433-9623 • https://hiyc.org/ summer-sail-camp

Franklin School of Performing Arts

Deer Run Camps A, F, G, M, S

SI

HIYC Sail Camp SP

Horton Haven Christian Camp F

Lebanon 1027-B W. Main St. Lebanon, TN 37087 547-1754

Discovery Center at Murfree Spring

636 Farrell Pkwy Nashville TN 37220 832-8197 • https://historictravellersrest. org/summer-camp/

4700 Franklin Road Nashville TN 37220 833-8845 https://www.franklinroadacademy.com/ summer-camp/summer-camps-info

415 Duke Drive, Suite 370 Franklin TN 37067 628-8444 https://franklinschoolofperformingarts. com/camps

3845 Perkins Road Thompson’s Station TN 37179 235-5688 https://deerrun.camp/camps/

Historic Travellers Rest Summer Camp A, AR, M, SI

Multiple Locations 1 Lifeway Plaza Nashville, TN 37234 1-877-CAMP-123 https://fugecamps.lifeway.com

Girl Scouts of Middle Tennessee Summer Camps M

4522 Granny White Pike Nashville TN 37204 383-0490 • https://gsmidtn.org/summer-camp/

Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont S 9275 Tremont Road Townsend TN 37882 865-448-6709 https://gsmit.org/summer-youth/

Harding Academy Summer Programs M

170 Windsor Drive Nashville TN 37205 356-0441 https://www.hardingacademy.org/ community/summer-programs

Harpeth Hall Summer Programs M 3801 Hobbs Road Nashville TN 37215 301-9286 • https://www.harpethhall. org/community/summer-camps

3711 Reed Harris Road Lewisburg TN 37091 931-364-7656 https://www.hortonhaven.org

Located at Vanderbilt University and 60 prestigious universities nationwide 2201 West End Ave. Nashville TN 37212 408- 871-2227 • https://www.idtech. com/locations/tennessee-summercamps/vanderbilt-university

Indian Creek Camps F

150 Cabin Circle Drive Liberty, TN 37095 548-4411 https://www.indiancreekcamp.com

John Knox Center M

591 West Rockwood Ferry Road Ten Mile TN 37880 865-376-2236 https://www.johnknoxcenter.org/

Leadership Academy M

PO Box 59074 Nashville TN 37205 856-4772 https://leadershipacademyllc.com/

McNeilly Center for Children M 100 Meridian St. Nashville TN 37207 255-2549 https://www.mcneillycenter.org/

Montgomery Bell Academy Summer Camp Programs M

4001 Harding Road Nashville TN 37205 298-5541 https://www.montgomerybell.edu/ camps/camps--special-programs

Mountain Bike Camp SP

Deep Well Trailhead, Percy Warner Park Nashville TN 37221 856-4772 https://leadershipacademyllc.com/ camps-list/mountain-bike-camp/

Mpact Martial Arts Summer Camps

SI

121 Seaboard Lane, Suite 1 Franklin TN 37067 377-3444 https://www.mpactsports.com/camp

Hermitage Dance Academy AR 3441 Lebanon Pike, Suite 130 Hermitage TN 37076 231-7100 https://hermitagedance.com/

nashvillescene.com/campguide

2/28/22 6:44 PM

A fun-filled week for Nashville’s most curious!

Your K-6th grader will enjoy a week of hands-on STEAM learning with other fellow science-enthusiasts. Weekly summer sessions explore themes from forensic investigation to wizarding worlds and the science behind superpowers.

Weekly sessions running May 30 - August 5.

Scan to register today!

Learn more at AdventureSci.org/camps nashvillescene.com | MARCH 3 – MARCH 9, 2022 | NASHVILLE SCENE

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Mr. Bond Science Guy M

1011 Gillock St. Suite 160136 Nashville TN 37216 573-2702 https://www.mrbondscienceguy.com/ science-camps

Murfreesboro Parks Summer Camps A, M 697 Veterans Parkway Murfreesboro TN 37128 890-5333 • https://murfreesborotn. gov/1550/Summer-Camps

Nashville Children’s Theatre Summer Camp AR

25 Middleton St. Nashville TN 37210 252-4675 https://www.nashvillechildrenstheatre. org/summer-camps-2022

Nashville Dance Center AR

4004 Hillsboro Pike Nashville TN 37215 385-7997 • https:// nashvilledancecenter.com/schedules/

Nashville Rowing Learn to Row SP

73 White Bridge Road Ste.103-311 Nashville TN 37205 no phone • https://www. nashvillerowing.org/summer-ltr-camps

Nashville Shakespeare Festival Apprentice Company AR

161 Rains Ave. Nashville TN 37203 255-2273 ext. 2 • https://www. nashvilleshakes.org/summer-camps

Nashville Zoo Summer Camp SI

3777 Nolensville Pike Nashville TN 37211 833-1534 https://www.nashvillezoo.org/camp

National Flight Academy S, SI, ST 1 Fetterman Way NAS Pensacola FL 32508 877-552-3632 • https://www. nationalflightacademy.com/

Owl’s Hill Nature Sanctuary SI Summer Camp 545 Beech Creek Road South Brentwood TN 37027 370-4672 https://www.owlshill.org/camps

Riverview Camp for Girls S

757 County Road 614 Mentone AL 35984 (800) 882-0722 https://www.riverviewcamp.net/

School of Nashville Ballet

AR

3630 Redmon St. Nashville TN 37209 297-2966 ext. 203 • https://www. nashvilleballet.com/summer-programs

Short Mountain Bible Camp F 650 Bible Camp Road Woodbury TN 37190 563-4168 • https://www. shortmountainbiblecamp.com/

Skyland Camp for Girls S 317 Spencer St. Clyde NC 28721 828-627-2470 https://skylandcamp.com/

Southern Prep Academy S

Tiger Camp at Percy Priest Elementary School G

1700 Otter Creek Road Nashville TN 37215 390-3167 • https://www.percypriest. org/parents/tiger-club/

Time to Learn: Summer Enrichment at Learning Lab AR, G, M, SI, ST

2416 21st Avenue South, Suite 100 Nashville TN 37212 321-7272

5500 Maryland Way, Suite 110 Brentwood TN 37027 377-2929 • https://www.mylearnlab. com/summer-learning-programs/

Space Camp S

TPGA Junior Golf Academy SI

1 Tranquility Base Huntsville AL 35805 800-637-7223 https://spacecamp.com/

St. Bernard Academy Summer Camp G

2304 Bernard Avenue Nashville TN 37212 385-0440 https://www.stbernardacademy.org/ academics/summer-program

St. Paul Christian Academy — Summer Days G

5033 Hillsboro Pike Nashville TN 37215 269-4751 https://www.stpaulchristianacademy. org/student-life/summer

Stage Right School of Performing Arts AR

2001 Campbell Station Parkway, Bldg C Suite 4 Spring Hill TN 37174 302-2881 • https://www.stageright615. com/events-and-calendar

Sylvan Learning Center - EDGE Camp ST

810 Medical Center Pkwy Ste C Murfreesboro TN 37129 900-2509 https://locations.sylvanlearning.com/ us/murfreesboro-tn

Teen Leadership Adventure G, M

Rocketown Summer Sessions AR

ROOTS Academy Music & Dance Summer Day Camps AR

Tennessee Martial Arts Academy SP

320 Southgate Court, Brentwood, TN 37027 804-1177 • https://www.rootsacademy. com/camps/

Corner of 17th Ave N and Jackson St, Nashville TN 37208 329-8605 https://www.fisk.edu/campus-life/getinvolved/summer-programs/

174 Ward Cir Camp Hill AL 36850 256-675-6260 https://southernprepacademy.org/ admissions/summer-programs/

Leadership Academy LLC PO Box 59074 Nashville, TN 37205 856-4772 https://leadershipacademyllc.com/ camps-list/teen-leaders/

601 Fourth Ave. S. Nashville TN 37210 843-4006 • https://www.rocketown. org/year-around-camps

Thrust Math & Science Summer Camp at FISK SI

8010 Safari Way Smyrna TN 37167 220-4211 https://www.tnmaa.com/read-me

400 Franklin Road Franklin TN 37069 465-6322 https://www.tngolf.org/learning-center/ tpga-jr-academy/2022-academy-daycamp-schedule-5729.html

Traumatic Brain Injury Program w/ Easter Seals Nashville SI 500 Wilson Pike Circle, Suite 228 Brentwood, TN 37027 292-6640 • https://www.easterseals. com/tennessee/our-programs/ camping-recreation/

University School of Nashville Summer Programs G

2000 Edgehill Ave. Nashville TN 37212 424-8823 • https://www.usn.org/ parents/usn-summer-camps

Valley View Ranch Equestrian Camp E, S 606 Valley View Ranch Road Cloudland, GA 30731 706-862-2231 https://valleyviewranch.com/

Victory Ranch S

4330 Mecklinburg Dr. Bolivar TN 38008 731-659-2880 • http://www. victoryranch.org/summer-camp/

Watkins at Belmont Young Artists Programs

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3157 Boyd Mill Avenue Franklin TN 37064 791-0590 https://www.williamsoncountysoccer. com/Default.aspx?tabid=319386

YMCA Camp Ocoee S

111 YMCA Drive Ocoee TN 37361 423-338-5588 https://www.ymcacampocoee.org/

YMCA Camp Piomingo S

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FOOD AND DRINK

XIAO WOW

While building out its East Nashville restaurant, Xiao Bao is serving some of the best food in town out of a trailer at The Dive Motel

BY JACK SILVERMAN

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PHOTO: DANIEL MEIGS

S

ome of the best food in Nashville is currently being served out of a nondescript red trailer on Dickerson Pike.

Since December, Joshua Walker and Duolan Li, the husband-and-wife team behind the XIAO BAO AT THE DIVE MOTEL popular Charleston, 1414 DICKERSON PIKE S.C., restaurant XIAOBAOBISCUIT.COM Xiao Bao Biscuit, have been earning a growing legion of fans with an intriguing roster of dishes inspired by both Li’s Chinese roots and the cuisines of other Asian cultures. And sometime this summer, they plan to open Xiao Bao as a full-service restaurant in East Nashville’s McFerrin Park neighborhood, on the same rapidly developing stretch of Meridian Street that’s home to Folk, Redheaded Stranger and Audrey.

Walker and Li, who still own the Charleston restaurant, moved to Nashville in December with their young daughter and two cats. They were seeking to open a new venture, but also looking for a change of pace that would include, among other things, a thriving art and music scene — Walker studied electronic music and is also a visual artist. They set up their trailer on the grounds of the renovated, retro-inspired Dive Motel and Swim Club, where you can eat your food in the vibey surroundings of the Dive Bar or grab it to go. Online takeout ordering is available, and they offer delivery via DoorDash.

For folks who decry Nashville’s relative dearth of good Chinese food, Xiao Bao will be a welcome addition. But it’s much more than just another Chinese restaurant, and not solely because it includes influences from other Asian cultures. In terms of both originality and execution, the food coming out of that trailer is some of the very best in town.

Though the Xiao Bao menu changes frequently, there’s one signature dish that’s always on offer: okonomiyaki. Known as oko for short, it’s a savory Japanese pancake that typically includes a flour batter and a variety of vegetables, mayonnaise and other toppings. For the Xiao Bao version, Walker, who is the chef, opts for a lighter version that uses just a little batter and emphasizes the vegetables, typically cabbage, carrots, scallions and kale or some other green. Vegetarians can order it as it comes, or you can add an egg, bacon, pork candy (!) or katsuobushi (a smoky fermented fish condiment).

Xiao Bao’s oko is based on a recipe the couple learned during their honeymoon, which included extensive travel throughout East Asia and a stint working on an organic farm in Japan through World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms, a sort of organic-

LA ZI JI farming cultural exchange program.

“When we were farming there,” Li says, “the host mom that we were staying with just picked stuff from her garden. She had this weird little flattop that she cooked it on.”

“It ended up being more like a hash brown than a pancake,” Walker adds. “That really appealed to us.”

The Xiao Bao oko is delightful, and it’s easy to see why it’s always on the menu.

But everything I have tried there is superb — nothing more so than the hand-pulled noodles with chili cumin brisket and sesame, which is hands-down the best noodle dish I’ve ever had. The noodles are thick, irregularly shaped, and have a wonderfully chewy texture that absorbs the flavor of the ingredients they’ve been cooked with.

“I call it perfect imperfection,” Walker says, “because it’s not like a consistent perfect noodle. You get bits that are chewier,

bits that are thinner.” And — unlike the Americanized Chinese food many of us have become accustomed to — the dish is (thankfully) not swimming in sauce. Most of the flavor has been absorbed into the noodles and brisket. Li says it’s more of a winter dish, common in Northwest China, so as warmer weather comes, another noodle dish may take its place.

Another eye-opening bite is the fried mochi. Unlike the ice-cream-filled version often served as a dessert, this is a savory dish — balls of glutinous rice flour filled with caramelized pork and served with lettuce (for wrapping) and a sweet-and-sour nuoc cham dipping sauce, a staple of Vietnamese cuisine. The contrast between the sweet pork filling and the tart nuoc cham is sublime.

The mochi is a prime example of the Xiao Bao ethos — a fusion of sorts, but not

in the kitschy sense embodied by so many suburban strip-mall restaurants. “For instance, our mochi dish, you’re never going to really find that in Asia, but the flavor profiles are very much authentic to things you would have had in Asia,” Li says. “For me, the outer shell reminds me of a Hong Kongese style dim sum, the sesame balls.

So it’s borrowing from that, but using a savory filling and combining with the nuoc cham. That dish itself is not authentic to any one region. Authenticity-wise, we try to stay true to our taste memory of what we’ve had, whether it’s from my childhood or from our travels.”

Other highlights from my Xiao Bao excursions: la zi ji — spicy chicken with green beans, chili peppers and Sichuan peppercorns, known for their mouthnumbing effect; som tum, a spicy green papaya salad with peanuts, herbs and fish

NASHVILLE SCENE | MARCH 3 – MARCH 9, 2022 | nashvillescene.com

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FOOD AND DRINK

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HAND-PULLED NOODLES sauce; and guo tie, delectable pan-seared pork dumplings that are all connected by a lacy crust. And notably, for an enterprise that’s been operating out of a trailer for just a few months, the dishes were consistently good on multiple visits.

The full-service restaurant, now in the works at 830 Meridian St., will be called simply Xiao Bao, skipping the “Biscuit” part of the Charleston restaurant’s name that was a nod to the Southern locale. And though the name might have you expecting bao buns, it’s a reference to Li’s nickname as a child, which translates to “little bundle.” The couple expects to have about 85 seats, a private dining room for large parties and several outdoor eating areas.

Walker will run the kitchen, and Li will handle operations.

And Li has another crucial role. “I taste the food,” she says. “Especially with Chinese dishes, I have a lot more say. But even me, I’m from northern China, so if he’s doing more of a Southern-China-influenced dish, I will probably have less say in it. …

When we travel to Southern China, he loves

Sichuan cuisine. … He’s really well-versed in Southeast Asian cuisine as well.”

Walker and Li currently plan to be open five days a week, closing on Tuesday and Wednesday to give their staff a couple days off. Those are their current days of operation at the trailer, too. Weekend brunch plans are also in the works, and they intend to keep the trailer running until the restaurant opens.

As for the design, Li says not to expect “that new or ethereal California vibe.” Instead, they plan to take design cues from Li’s younger years in China.

“It’s not going to be what people think when they think of China,” Li says. “I came from the Communist era growing up there. ...

I think it’s going to feel very comfortable, but also kind of different. It’s rooted in a certain nostalgia for me. ” “That’s the fun part of the restaurant,” Walker says. “You get to tell a story: the decor, the music and the food. When you’re getting all those things right, that’s what makes people happy.”

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ART

CRAWL SPACE: MARCH 2022 This month’s First Saturday events include must-see shows at Elephant Gallery, Modfellows, Julia Martin Gallery and Red Arrow Gallery

BY JOE NOLAN

F

ebruary is only a few days shorter than any other month, but even just a couple of lost sunrises can make March’s First Saturday events feel like they’re arriving unfashionably early. Luckily we’ve been anticipating this month’s events since the end of 2021, and March gallerygoers will be treated to a number of new exhibition openings that have been lighting up our radar.

Benji Anderson gets the March festivities started early when he opens The Fitful Portal at Elephant Gallery this Friday, March 4. We’re glad this one is jumping the gun on the First Saturday events — Anderson’s show simply couldn’t have arrived quickly enough. We’re anticipating an all-over display of drawings and Etch A Sketch art from Anderson, and reports that the artist is repainting the walls and floors at the North Nashville space have us expecting the kind of playful, immersive installation the gallery is best known for. Anderson’s Instagram followers (@benjianderson3) have been treated to regular previews of what the artist might bring to the show, including elaborate, idiosyncratic scenes of magical monsters and fantastical environments, plus colorful collections of imaginary animals that recall the flat, graphic-like compositions of Mike Kelley’s glued felt menageries.

If you’ve ever caught one of Anderson’s improvised musical performances, you’ll know there is a visionary component at work in Anderson’s sometimes frenzied-seeming expressions. All of these crazy creatures and transforming landscapes come from inside Anderson’s creative consciousness, but one gets the sense that he goes to a pretty farout place to capture them in paintings and works on paper or on one of the screens of his sketching toys. Put on your kaleidoscope eyes for this one.

GRASSMERE

The folks at Modfellows Gallery caught our attention last month when they opened their new satellite gallery at The Packing Plant with a strong display from East Nashville painter Ryan Michael Noble. This Saturday we’ve got our eyes trained back at Modfellows’ Grassmere headquarters, where they’re opening a supremely satirical display by Nashville street photographer Bill Gubbins. Gubbins’ show arrives on the heels of Michael Ray Nott’s epic February Honkytonx exhibition at Chauvet Arts, and we’re starting to get the feeling that local street photography is low-key trending right now.

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PHOTO: BILL GUBBINS

NORTH NASHVILLE

THIS AMERICAN CARNAGE AT MODFELLOWS GALLERY There’s an intrinsic — sometimes ironic — glamour to Nott’s black-and-white images of Lower Broadway debauchery, but Gubbins’ exhibition is a full-flush display of colorful characters on the front lines of the culture wars. This American Carnage takes its title from Donald Trump’s unforgettable dystopian inauguration speech and the cultural divide it was emblematic of — or at least playing to. Today this often surreal struggle continues to play out in the real world in pockets of protest, in consumer goods messaging and — mostly — in the corporate media and on social platforms. Local music scenesters should be familiar with Gubbins’ excellent book of Frank Zappa photographs, documenting the recording of the mustachioed maestro’s groundbreaking Hot Rats LP. Gubbins brings the same sly and satirical sensibility to his snapshots that Zappa brought to his composing. A little irony goes a very long way, but Gubbins’ detached lensing only helps animate and energize the frenzy tangled in our social fabric.

WEDGEWOOD-HOUSTON

For March, Julia Martin Gallery is hosting a pair of local artists whose creative practices document Nashville’s relentlessly transforming streetscapes. Peggy Snow’s decades-long painting practice finds her bringing plein air traditions to the urban settings where she documents golden-hour moments with Nashville structures slated for demolition. Snow has captured the kinds of historical architectural treasures that Nashville still struggles to protect properly, and she’s also immortalized cultural touchstones like the fabled J&J’s Market, freezing

them forever in impressionistic applications of colorful globs of paint on canvas. Martin and curator Daniel Lonow have paired Snow’s work alongside a selection of sculptures from Emily Holt, whose assemblages and figures are made up of the concrete, metal, plastic and wooden detritus from actual demolition sites. The artist transforms these found materials into memento mori, recollecting the lost architectural spaces and structures that continue to disappear all over our city. Saturday evening’s opening reception starts at 6 p.m. and will feature live music from Ziona Riley. Rumors of a set from Snow’s longtime band Cherry Blossoms are rampant.

EAST NASHVILLE

We shouted out Lauren Gregory’s March show at Red Arrow Gallery in our Winter Arts Guide a couple months back, and this month’s display at the East Nashville space promises to be one of the best painting exhibitions of the season. Gregory is as painterly as Peggy Snow, but is best known for portraiture. Gregory has shown her work at venues around the world, including MoMA PS1, New Museum and MOCA Los Angeles, and the artist has recently relocated to Nashville. Gregory is also one of a small contingent of local artists pushing their traditional practices into the digital realm and onto pioneering blockchain platforms.

Her generous application of oils brings energized textures to her expressive faces.

This, combined with Gregory’s improvisational, instantaneous, one-sitting painting style, finds these works naturally lending themselves to the artist’s stop-motion-

animated experiments, which have come to represent the ultimate expression of her art. Gregory brings a 21st-century multimedia understanding of creativity to painted portraiture, and the results marry the thrillseeking of a pioneering practice with one of art’s oldest and most universal traditions.

Expect to see Gregory’s paintings, abstract quilts and animations in Here for a Good Time,

Not a Long Time.

EMAIL ARTS@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

A ROOM WITH A VIEW Vadis Turner’s Window Treatments is a multimedia meditation on liminal spaces

BY JOE NOLAN

“R

ed Gate” was the knockout work in Vadis Turner’s last solo exhibition at Zeitgeist — 2018’s Bedfellows. The massive grid made of twisted bedsheets that the artist dyed a deep VADIS TURNER: WINDOW crimson red dominated TREATMENTS THROUGH MARCH 19 AT an entire wall of the ZEITGEIST gallery, and was immediately recognizable as a breakthrough piece for the artist. Before “Red Gate,” Turner’s best known works had been squarish wall sculptures constructed from shimmering ribbons, and small installations of objects and materials the

NASHVILLE SCENE | MARCH 3 – MARCH 9, 2022 | nashvillescene.com

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wall. Upon closer inspection, the surface of the grid looks like the titular flowers frozen in ice or encased in glass. It would all be so dramatically delicate if not for the exposed rebar frame and the harsh white LEDs glowing between the front and back halves of the sculpture. The first time I saw the piece, I felt a jolt of weirdness when the audiovisual elements responded as I moved in for a closer look. “Rose Window” recalls the floral subjects of traditional still lifes. It’s also very Blade Runner.

The smallest work in the show is also one of the most outstanding. “Ribbon and Rebar Study” is a delicate drawing that features a piece of loose dangling ribbon sewn through paper that’s decorated with an expressive wash of pink acrylic. The work is framed and hangs on the wall, and its presentation makes it feel even more like a traditional work on paper. The “study” title implies this is a threaded maquette of some kind, but Turner isn’t in the habit of making mock-ups of her work before she creates her large final forms. This “study” is a distillation after the fact. “Ribbon and Rebar Study” recalls the hues of “Rose Window,” but its plunging lines reflect “Conduit” — a large work that hangs on the wall opposite “Study.” “Conduit” features tubular segments of bedsheets, cement and polyfill alternately painted with white acrylic or decorated with copper. The segments curve and droop lyrically in successive vertical waves down the surface of a visible steel grid. The contrast of the grid against the voluptuous, gracefully draping shapes is dramatic, and I hope the smart, refined piece points to the direction Turner is headed next.

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artist organized on gallery floors. The comparatively massive scale of “Red Gate” made it stand out from Turner’s other work with various fabrics, but the work also conjured novel themes about the liminal spaces occupied by doors, windows and gates.

The gravitas of large-scale work and themes about in-between spaces are front and center in Turner’s current Zeitgeist exhibition, Window Treatments. The show finds Turner expanding on an indoor-outdoor dichotomy by including lots of natural materials in her sculptures, and also includes audio-video collaborations that elevate the already ambitious exhibition into an immersive installation that plays to viewers both inside the gallery and in the surrounding Wedgewood-Houston neighborhood.

Scale is the big — pun intended — detail that I noticed both times I visited the exhibition at Zeitgeist.

The show features a dozen works ranging across the entire Zeitgeist display space, which is almost always programmed to include work from two artists at a time. The exhibition flows naturally between massive wall-hanging works that act like bookends on the gallery’s front and back walls — sprawling freestanding sculptures blend with smaller works on pedestals and other large and small pieces mounted on walls.

But it’s the biggest pieces, and all their tiny details, that first demand attention.

“Drawn Curtain” and “Weighted Window” open the show, hanging on the same front gallery wall that held “Red Gate” four years ago. Together, the works measure approximately 12 by 15 feet, and the sideby-side gallery design reads like the artist is literally doubling down on the potential promised by “Red Gate.” Turner has replaced the bedsheets of “Red Gate” with curtains in these works, but she’s also incorporated copper, acrylic, gravel, resin and ribbon.

The same materials appear throughout the exhibition, and help vary the colors and surfaces between these similarly structured, grid-shaped pieces, while the copper and gravel speak to the natural spaces that lie beyond our windows. Combinations of these materials cover the sprawling, sinewy surfaces of the works with intricate expressions of color and texture, shape and finish, making each of the sculptures thoroughly gawkable, whether at 20 inches or 20 feet.

From Mondrian to Judd, it’s clear that the art-going public loves a good grid. And Félix González-Torres managed to transform real windows into actual art by adorning them with sheer flowing curtains in his “Untitled (Loverboy)” installation. Turner incorporates Zeitgeist’s generous gallery windows by using audio and visual elements to extend the exhibition to the other side of the glass.

Turner won a Current Arts Fund/Tri-Star Arts grant to help fund this exhibition, which includes lighting and projection mapping by Mike Kluge and Jonny Kingsbury, and motion-activated sound design by Emery Dobyns. One of my favorite pieces in the show is “Rose Window,” which reads like a massive red grid framed in a glowing pink light on the gallery’s back

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“I

’ve always had the same predicament,” Owen Callahan states in the opening line of Lee Cole’s debut novel, Groundskeeping. “When I’m home, in Kentucky, all I want is to leave.

When I’m away, I’m homesick for a place that never was.”

GROUNDSKEEPING Owen has reBY LEE COLE cently returned to ALFRED A. KNOPF his hometown after 322 PAGES, $28 failing to make it on COLE WILL DISCUSS HIS BOOK 6:30 P.M. THURSDAY, his own in Colorado.

MARCH 3, AT PARNASSUS He gets a job as a BOOKS; THE EVENT IS FREE groundskeeper at BUT PREREGISTRATION IS Ashby, a small priREQUIRED vate college in the foothills. The job isn’t Owen’s first choice, but it means he can enroll in one class for free on campus, so he chooses a writing workshop. Currently crashing in the basement of his grandfather Pop’s cracker-box house on the edge of Louisville, Owen is just trying to get back on his feet.

Owen wants to be a writer, but most of the writing he does is notes on his day, the landscape around him, and many of the conversations he has. His parents and Pop don’t really see the value in writing, and while Pop considers groundskeeping “an honorable vocation,” Owen’s parents still think he is not taking his life seriously. When Owen meets Alma, the visiting writer at Ashby, he finds himself generating a lot of material; however, the material is largely faithful transcriptions of his time and conversations with Alma.

Owen first meets Alma at a party thrown by one of the grad students. Owen is a bit drunk, but he sees Alma watching him and decides to approach her. When he asks where she’s from, she replies, “A country that no longer exists.” After Alma and Owen have gotten to know each other a little better, Alma quizzes Owen on how he would like to be identified as a writer, if he considers himself “more of a regional writer” and if he would like to be introduced as a “Kentucky writer” or an “American writer.” Owen responds that he does not know what it means to be a regional writer and states: “Kentucky is America. ... If you write about one, you’re writing about the other.” For Owen, he’s never had to consider his identity in relation to place because he has never felt connected to his hometown. Alma, on the other hand, comes from Bosniak parents who fled the war with her when she was a child.

After Owen attends one of Alma’s readings in a local bar, she invites him to come with her to another venue where she is meeting some of her friends. Afterward, the pair walks endlessly down the streets, talking late into the night. Once they’ve grown comfortable with each other, Alma admits that she is seeing someone, so Owen walks her back to her car, where he watches her drive away. Owen later visits a bar in Germantown with his groundskeeping co-worker James, and it’s there he runs

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WED 3.09  TY SEGALL (SOLO BAND) W/ CHARLES MOOTHART

into Casey, one of the few people in his writing workshop. Later, when Owen steps outside to relieve himself — since the only bathroom in the bar seems to be occupied indefinitely, and no one responds when the bartender beats on the locked door — he spies a parked car with a couple kissing in the front seat. He recognizes Casey by his hat, and once he gets closer, he sees that the woman is Alma.

Cole creates an interesting foil between Owen — a man who has a clear knowledge of where he is from yet who has always felt disconnected from the landscape — and Alma, who struggles with being raised as an American in Alexandria, Va., while still identifying strongly with her short childhood in Sarajevo. Yet Owen does feel an instinctive respect for the enduring value of place.

Although he spends much of his time at work removing trees, he says, “I sometimes felt bad about felling a tree. ... I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was a sin, somehow.” There is a certain kind of sadness when a tree is felled, “even when the tree was dead, because you knew it had grown for decades or centuries even, attaining its prominence, and it took so little effort to topple.”

As confrontations bloom, Owen finds himself lying to multiple people to avoid conflict, effectively distancing himself from those who care about him. Alma seems to be the only light of joy remaining, but after several disagreements, Owen realizes he doesn’t know Alma quite as well as he thought. As his creative writing teacher says, people are always more complicated than they seem on the surface. Owen must navigate his own place in both the political and geographical landscape around him, even though he might isolate himself from those he loves in the process.

For more local book coverage, please visit Chapter16.org, an online publication of Humanities Tennessee.

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MUSIC

Led by polymath Allen Epley, Shiner rolls into town behind their instant post-hardcore classic Schadenfreude

BY CHARLIE ZAILLIAN

F

ans of Midwestern thinkingperson’s hard-rock institution Shiner may have done a double take when they saw the Kansas City-raised foursome would be playing Drkmttr (capacity: about 100) on March 9. It’s not outside PLAYING DRKMTTR the realm of reason WEDNESDAY, MARCH 9 to expect that the better-late-than-never tour behind Shiner’s 2020 album Schadenfreude — their fifth LP overall, and first in almost two decades — might stop at a bigger venue in Nashville.

The band’s formative second album Lula Divinia, released 25 years ago this month, and The Egg, a high-water mark for the genre released in 2001, are time-tested documents of post-hardcore at its most progressive. (See also: Jawbox, Quicksand, Shudder to Think.) Talking to the Scene

SHORT CUTS

Kyle Frederick’s Mr. Mercurial is a masterpiece of concision

BY EDD HURT

S

tripping down rock ’n’ roll to its essentials is a method that goes back to the music’s earliest days. When you listen to Jerry Lee Lewis’ Sun Records singles, or Jonathan Richman’s 1972 protoMR. MERCURIAL OUT punk tune “Roadrunner,” NOW VIA MELODY you hear the sound of CHEF MUSIC minimalist anxiety. Other techniques that rockers sometimes use are substi-

36

ahead of Wednesday’s show — which locals and avowed Shiner admirers Tape Deck Mountain open — singer-guitarist Allen Epley pithily describes Shiner’s sonic goals: “Pounding. Mathy. Unflinching.”

There can be a chasm between perception and reality when it comes to the living we think the bands we love are making, and the amount of work that goes into them simply being able to continue creating. That’s the crux of Epley’s interview podcast Third Gear Scratch. The show, which debuted on streaming platforms in 2019, chronicles the offstage exploits of the people in the Chicago-residing Epley’s sphere — old friends and new acquaintances, household names and cult faves, rock and otherwise. Its reach isn’t limited to musicians. He’s also talked to filmmakers and actors, like Patrick Fabian, better known as Better Call Saul’s debonair lawyer Howard Hamlin.

tuting keyboards for guitars or letting various percussion instruments stand in for drums, which is the approach The Beach Boys used on their 1977 album The Beach Boys Love You. These creative shortcuts to rock profundity provide the key to understanding the new album by Nashville-area singer, songwriter and guitarist Kyle Frederick. Called Mr. Mercurial, the LP was released Feb. 25.

In every way, Frederick’s latest music subverts the idea of a rock performance, and his subject is the way the anxieties of the modern world can be tamed by close attention to spiritual matters. Still, Mr. Mercurial rocks and rolls even as it eschews the traditional band setup of drums, bass and electric guitars. It’s a startlingly original record that colors outside the lines of Nashville music.

Besides playing, podcasting and his day job with Blue Man Group (really!), Epley is also a music instructor, bartender, husband and father. Since Shiner initially split in 2003, he has led The Life and Times, a power trio that leans into his lifelong Rush obsession — on several tunes, Epley deploys a hair-raising falsetto — while embracing more economical songcraft. The group has made five LPs and counting.

Epley recently wrapped his first solo record (title and release TBA), drawing inspiration from Elliott Smith as well as Beck’s Sea Change. He’s also been playing in Broasis — a tribute act that, given the volatile Gallagher brothers’ continued refusal to bury the hatchet and stage a comeback, might be the next-best thing to Oasis itself. “We turn the lights on, turn the fog to where we’re just silhouettes and rock out,” Epley explains.

“It’s nice to not play our own stupid indierock songs. Every song is a banger, and we love it.”

For the 52-year-old musician, having worn all these hats creates a natural rapport and mutual comfort level with his interviewees.

On Third Gear Scratch — named for a key Lula Divinia track — requisite whos, whats,

PHOTO: BJ JORDAN

K.C. MASTERPIECE

wheres and whys get knocked out quickly before going deep and getting real. Episodes run a minimum of an hour-and-a-half; many surpass two.

“I started it to salvage my way out of an existential crisis,” Epley says of the podcast.

“I’d always imagined I’d someday stop with the music. But here I was, close to 50, and just realized I’m a full-time musician. This is what I do. Even if I have to do something else in order to facilitate it, I’m going to do this for the rest of my life. When I realized that, I breathed a sigh of relief. Choosing art as a career is something we all question constantly. It’s turned out that there’s an audience for it.”

TGS hit its stride during the pandemic slowdown that began in 2020. That summer, Illinois space-rock icons Hum — who’d frequently summoned Shiner as openers in the ’90s — surprise-released Inlet, their first LP since their 1998 magnum opus Downward Is Heavenward. Two months earlier, Shiner had issued Schadenfreude. Strong cases can be made for these records as new high points in both bands’ catalogs. For the 100th episode of TGS last year, Hum’s press-averse leader Matt Talbott did a rare Q&A with Epley, as well as a solo performance for a live audience at Chicago club Fitzgerald’s.

Shiner’s current lineup — Epley, lead guitarist Josh Newton, bassist Paul Malinowski and drummer Jason Gerken — has been locked in since The Egg’s 2000 predecessor Starless. In 2012 the group broke a 10-year hiatus with a series of reunion shows in the Midwest, a practice that would continue more or less biennially through 2018. At that point, the four agreed that it was time to either add to the set list or lay the band to rest.

Epley and Newton began by revisiting demos of old unfinished Shiner riffs in search of something to build off of, but quickly concluded that writing all new parts — which became colossal-sounding Schadenfreude standouts like Epley’s “Life as a Mannequin” and the Newton-composed “Low Hanging Fruit” — felt much more satisfying.

“It’s thrilling to get to [play] again, and be reminded that yes, we are a good band — and that we’ve actually gotten better as we’ve gotten older,” Epley says. “I might be the lone original member and have always been the songwriter, but it’s a democratic, four-way partnership. We’re not fighting. We aren’t arguing. We’re just glad to be together. We realize life is short, and want to take advantage.”

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Indeed, Mr. Mercurial lives up to its euphonious title. It’s a suite of 13 mostly short tunes — some tracks run just over one minute — that adds up to an examination of spiritual malaise, celebrity culture and the myth of rock ’n’ roll.

Co-producer Byron House, who also produced Frederick’s previous releases, adds percussion, keyboards and background vocals to Frederick’s songs. In addition, Frederick plays only acoustic guitar on the album, and his ingenious licks provide the backbone of every song. His guitar work derives from power pop and folk rock, but the singularity of his conception turns the clichés on their heads.

Frederick was born in Louisville, Ky., in 1960 and grew up in Bowling Green, aspiring to become a professional guitarist. Mr. Mercurial is both the product of his vast experience as a rock picker and the result of the process of making a multilayered rock record piecemeal in the studio.

“We worked on this for two years,” Frederick says from his home in Mt. Juliet, where he’s lived since 2005. “It took me a year to write it and a year to record it. It’s not my nature to be patient.

This process absolutely requires it, and it’s helped me to slow down. I think it’s helping me to write too, you know what I mean? I’d love to do it where you could crank it up and just go, ‘Here are the songs.’ But I’ve become used to the process. It’s out of necessity.”

During his time in Bowling Green, Frederick joined a band with Bowling Green native Bill Lloyd, with whom he would later tour as guitarist for country-pop act Foster & Lloyd. Frederick also toured with a group called TyBarc, which opened shows for Brownsville Station and Black Oak Arkansas in the late ’70s. By the time he moved to Nashville in 1980, he was a first-rate guitarist, and he joined the band of country singer Joe Sun in 1981.

Frederick gained invaluable experience on the road with Foster & Lloyd and Sun, but you get the sense he wanted to do something more individualistic. As he tells me, he’s a fan of Todd Rundgren and British Invasion rock. Mr. Mercurial amounts to an abstraction of Beatles-derived music that stands tall with the work of XTC and Chris Bell.

When Frederick uses the traditional format of drums, bass and electric guitars — as he does on “What the World Needs Now,” a track on his 2020 EP Mother Humble — the results are stunning.

Mr. Mercurial is the statement of a seeker after spiritual truths, which means “Write On” and “I Was There” mention Nelson Mandela, Moses, Jesus and Richard Nixon. Meanwhile, “The Tilda” is about the allure of actress Tilda Swinton, and exists on its own plane of eternal verities. As Frederick sings: “It won’t kill ya / To do the Tilda Swinton with me.”

On Mercurial, Frederick sings in the voice of an ordinary guy who seems as confused — and as elated — by the world as anyone else. Because his songs are so brief, they have a gnomic quality, as if he’s plucked them out of his subconscious, anchored them with riffs that often defy bar lines, and added touches of avant-garde pop to put them across.

Frederick’s music operates in its own aural universe, and its extreme compression will likely satisfy fans of the work of power-pop giants like Game Theory leader Scott Miller, though Frederick’s subtly Christian message sets it apart from, say, Game Theory’s 1987 album Lolita Nation. As he says, he’s not interested in doing the standard song-and-dance.

“It’s not a strategy,” he says of his creative process. “It’s realizing you have these parts, this melody, these words and these chords. I tend to go, ‘This is pretty economical, and I like it.’ ” EMAIL MUSIC@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

THE SPIN LIFTING SPIRITS

BY CHARLIE ZAILLIAN

T

hursday was not great. Hour by hour, people around the globe watched as more chilling images of the Russian invasion of Ukraine made their way to screens. On the home front, we slogged through a rainy, frigid, winter afternoon. Without the hip-hop show at Mercy Lounge that I’d signed up to cover, there’s zero chance I’d have left the couch.

The promise of Namir Blade’s set alone justified closing all tabs for the rest of the evening and making the trip downtown.

When I interviewed the Nashville rap eccentric at his home in June, he talked about the importance of making every show a singular event like his hero Prince did. He walked the walk a few weeks later at Acme Feed and Seed, flexing his skills on the mic and the depth of his songbook.

The undercard of rising MCs SeddyMac, VibeOut and CamFerg was backed by a capable five-piece ensemble called The Blue House Band. Blade put them to the test with his tunes’ dynamism and variety, and the pairing not only succeeded, it wowed.

For “Patlabor,” an understated number from 2020’s epic Aphelion’s Traveling Circus, Blade foisted a cowbell onto guitarist Alex Bonyata, transforming the song into a percussive disco outburst, almost unrecognizable compared to its recorded version. I thought I knew Aphelion’s well, but I had to flag down the Blue House guys post-show to ID the song. Elsewhere, the group amplified bluesier elements of Imaginary Everything, Blade’s 2021 collab with producer L’Orange.

A Delta-blues-style rendition of the record’s riff-tastic titular opener kicked off the set, while a just-as-passionate take on “Nihilism,” its cheerfully grimy consensus fave, closed it.

It’s a joy to watch Blade continue to finetune his act with each show without looking or sounding labored. Not one to practice moves in the mirror ahead of the gig, he took the stage in an incongruous combo of purple windbreaker, black bucket hat and P.E.-class track pants. Without explanation, he performed the first two songs holding a red Nintendo Game Boy that wasn’t plugged into anything.

Blade keeps the vibe loose, but he keeps his bars tight. Every song played Thursday reached an intense fever pitch before he gave the signal to end it. Longtime Scene freelance photog Lance Conzett astutely likened the 30-year-old’s balance of command and lightheartedness to the work of rappercomic Open Mike Eagle.

Next in the lineup was FU Stan, another East Sider who didn’t let COVID blunt his creativity. Both of his pandemic-time releases are highly compelling. He followed up his 2020 EP, the matter-of-factly titled Lockdown, with last year’s BeHoward collab album Claude & Ray. Stan’s set on Thursday was split roughly into two acts, and for the first, BeHoward joined him. The pair seemed to share a brain whether they were rapping or not. The old-school Dirty South

LIKE THE WIND: NAMIR BLADE

WON’T BACK DOWN: PETTY

READY FOR SEDDY: SEDDYMAC

PHOTOS: LANCE CONZETT

MUSIC

THE BOYS ARE BACK: BEHOWARD AND FU STAN storytelling that underpins Claude & Ray appears to come from a natural rapport.

Their between-song banter was the stuff of primo sketch comedy. Things skewed more earnest once BeHoward made his exit. In any case, Stan hooked me with the baseball-jargon-laden “Play the Game” and its reference to a certain Bordeaux-raised Dodgers outfielder: “Once you get the lead, ain’t no looking back / I’m on my way to Cali like I’m Mookie Betts!”

In an interview ahead of the show, ultraprolific rapper Petty told the Scene how stoked he was to make his first live appearance in years. Unfortunately, it seemed like the circumstances of crummy weather and a lengthy lineup weren’t working in his fa-

vor. By the time he went on, the responsive crowd from earlier had thinned to mostly die-hard fans. Those who knew the songs well were absolutely flipping out about getting to hear them in person; as a relative newcomer to his extensive catalog, I found it tough to get my bearings.

Overall, it feels like having more shows, whose bills are at least a little more compact, would be a boon to Nashville hip-hop. And with a collection of songs as diverse and vast as Petty’s, it’s no joke that something like a residency gig might help get people really clued into what he’s got to offer — with as much material as he has to draw from, it’s hard to imagine the well running dry.

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FILM

AYE, ROBOT Kogonada’s After Yang is beautiful and raw, but predictable

BY NADINE SMITH

S

AN UNABASHED,

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FOR 30 YEARS.

NASHVILLESCENE.COM 38

cience-fiction gives filmmakers a unique opportunity for metaphor and allegory, helping us better understand our own world by transporting us to another. Russian literary scholar Darko Suvin, who devoted his career to understanding and defining the genre of scifi, called this founding principle “cognitive estrangement” — meaning that sci-fi often takes familiar issues and problems from our own world and allows us to see them from a new perspective by placing them in a different context.

The new film After Yang is predicated on the idea of cognitive estrangement, using an image of the future to help the audience find new ways to empathize with struggles in the present day. Adapted from a short story by author Alexander Weinstein, After Yang inevitably recalls Steven Spielberg’s heart-shattering Pinocchio story A.I. Artificial Intelligence, but director Kogonada uses android-human relations to explore a different set of questions. His debut feature Columbus is all about public spaces, following two lonely hearts who connect amid the modernist architecture that Columbus, Ind., is known for. But After Yang is noticeably devoid of public space, set in a tastefully designed future where everyone is trapped in the monotonous solace of self-driving cars shuttling between work, home, repeat.

It’s the near future, that same not-sofar-off place we’ve seen in movies like Her and Ex Machina, where everyone wears high-waisted pants and turtlenecks and everything looks like it was bought at a Muji.

Parents Jake and Kyra (Colin Farrell and Jodie Turner-Smith) have adopted two children: a young girl named Mika, and an older robot brother named Yang. Mika is Chinese and her parents are not, so they’ve adopted Yang with the hopes that he might be able to give her some greater connection to her heritage and history than they could. While Yang has been programmed to rattle off 1,001 fun facts about Chinese history, he too struggles deeply with his connection to his identity — what does it mean for a robot, designed by humans to look like a human, to have a culture or ethnicity or even a personal identity? Yang may have been designed to “look Chinese.” He may have been programmed with an infinite wealth of knowledge about the nation. But like Mika, he has no direct connection to this part of himself — probably even less so since he is on some level aware that he was “made” to be Chinese.

When Yang’s robotic interior starts to break down and he shuts off, it sends the family into crisis. Mika grieves her brother, while Jake and Kyra worry about their daughter’s emotional health and ability to accept the loss — and they also mourn someone they have come to see as a son. Jake tries his best to put Yang back together again, but he comes up against the staunch corporate forces of his world, who have very precise

AFTER YANG PG, 96 MINUTES OPENING FRIDAY, MARCH 4, AT THE BELCOURT AND STREAMING VIA SHOWTIME

rules and regulations about opening up robots and what they can and cannot fix — an experience that has obvious echoes for anyone who has ever tried to get something fixed at an Apple Store. His desperation leads him to an underground technician, who opens up Yang and finds a cube inside that contains something like memories, short seconds of time and images that Yang’s processors have recorded and archived throughout his life.

Jake descends deeply into Yang’s mind, viewing his literal experiences and eventually discovering that Yang had an interior life all his own, with unknown thoughts and passions, and even something of an emotional entanglement with a clone (Haley Lu Richardson).

It’s a premise with so much nuanced and complex potential, but filmmaker Kogonada poses fascinating questions only to offer the most obvious answers. When Mika and Yang discuss what it means to have “real” parents and to be connected to a family, he takes her to an orchard to show her a tree with a limb that’s been grafted on, and offers an on-thenose explanation for how this limb is just like her, taken from another tree and sutured to a new one. It’s a potentially powerful metaphor, but when it’s explained so literally, it feels like an easy solution to a complicated emotional issue.

Kogonada, who was formerly based in Nashville, began his career as a video essayist, making short films about the works of

BIG SHORTS

See this year’s Oscarnominated short films on the big screen at the Belcourt

BY JOE NOLAN

T

hree separate selections of this year’s Academy Award-nominated short films debut at the Belcourt Theatre this weekend. Whether you’re a miniature-movie fan or just an awards-season obsessive, these distinct shorts programs all offer unique titles including live-action narratives, documentary films and even animated films.

We love a great animated shorts program, and this year’s Oscar nominees offer a killer slate of curt cartoons. Joanna Quinn and Les Mills’ “Affairs of the Art” is a study of family and obsession told through

other auteurs by pulling out the most striking and stunning images from their movies.

Those origins frequently come across in his movies, in which every frame is precise and carefully designed, both beautiful and claustrophobic. It feels like there is often no room to breathe or move, that every image is an immaculate composition that cannot be disturbed by human hands. There are no accidents; everything is planned, to the point VISIT NASHVILLESCENE.COM that it begins to feel TO READ OUR REVIEW predictable, if still viOF THE BATMAN, sually beautiful and at IN THEATERS MARCH 4. times emotionally raw.

Though the soundtrack features an original song from Mitski and contributions from legendary composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, it sometimes feels oppressive as well, as lonesome piano keys thunderously remind us that these characters are sad. After Yang feels like a closed circuit — perhaps even like a perfectly designed robot, with no room for accident or mess. Every theme it presents and every problem it poses is perfectly answered, just like a computer executing a set of algorithmic commands. But sometimes the most insightful — and most human — way to answer a question is not to answer it at all.

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the circuitous tales of Beryl, a 59-year-old factory worker rediscovering her love of art making. This is Quinn’s fourth short based on her Beryl character, but it’s the first to introduce viewers to Beryl’s supremely eccentric family. There’s some fun storytelling here, but the real highlights are Quinn’s gorgeous hand-drawn imagery and the filmmakers’ accurate identification of the hallmark of true artistry: compulsion. In Hugo Covarrubias and Tevo Díaz’s “Bestia,” audiences endure a surreal and increasingly disturbing exploration of the day-to-day life of a secret police agent in the military dictatorship of Chile. The cracked psychology of a country and its citizens is revealed as alarming details emerge from the seemingly banal reality of an anonymous woman and her loyal pooch. “Robin Robin” is a Netflix production helmed by Dan Ojari and Mikey Please. The directing duo deploys a talented cast of voice actors — including Gillian Anderson and Richard E. Grant — in this delightfully designed stop-motion tale about a clan

NASHVILLE SCENE | MARCH 3 – MARCH 9, 2022 | nashvillescene.com

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of mice who rescue a robin’s egg from a menacing cat. “Robin Robin” is a musical featuring a number of memorable songs over its half-hour run time, and it’s also a Christmas story that ties the wish-granting power of the holidays to themes of family, loyalty and growing up. On the opposite end of the animatedshort spectrum is “The Windshield Wiper” — an adult-themed story written, designed and directed by Alberto Mielgo. Mielgo uses keyframe animation to create what looks like a blend between video footage and cartoon imagery — the film’s look and philosophical themes recall Richard Linklater’s rotoscope masterpiece Waking Life. “The Windshield Wiper” also boasts one of the best onscreen text-messaging sequences ever, and the film reminds us that animation can be seriously engaging when it takes on serious themes like modern dating, suicidal tendencies, the multifaceted sensuality of cigarette smoking, mortality, and the answer to the question “What is love?”

Live-action shorts aren’t just abbreviations of their feature-film siblings. Like novels and short stories, these are two separate art forms despite their similarities. The great strength of — and biggest challenge for — short cinema is its capacity for distillation. An Oscar-nominated Kyrgyzstan/Switzerland short offers an intense cultural drama stripped of narrative artifice: Maria Brendle and Nadine Lüchinger’s “Ala Kachuu — Take and Run” tells the tale of a young Kyrgyz woman whose dreams of university life in the city are challenged by the Kyrgyz culture’s marriage traditions.

The film is more emotionally harrowing than I knew a short could be thanks to some great ensemble acting playing against dramatic exteriors. “Please Hold” does a whole lot with very little, turning this one-actor drama into a satire of the self-serving corporate prison economy of the near future. K.D. Dávila and Levin Menekse’s short impressively recalls Sorry to

Bother You, but with a full dose of A Scanner Darkly techno-paranoia. Nashville audiences will also appreciate Martin Strange-Hansen and Kim Magnusson’s “On My Mind,” which wraps a story of grief and goodbyes around a country music chestnut.

This year’s selection of Oscar-nominated documentary shorts offers true-life stories that deliver plenty of drama and insight without the luxury of feature-length run times. Matt Ogens and Geoff McLean’s “Audible” profiles the Maryland School for the Deaf’s champion high school football team.

This short’s epic intro turns the stock pigskin-cinema scene of the dramatic halftime-locker-room speech on its head before handing off a moving movie about growing up on and off the field. Jay Rosenblatt’s “When We Were Bullies” is a Ross McElwee-esque movie memoir about the director and an elementary school friend — the pair is reunited by a strange coincidence before they reconstruct their mutual memories of bullying another boy in fifth grade. This film is nostalgic without being overly sweet, and it brings a fresh perspective and nuanced understanding to a painful subject. Ben Proudfoot’s “The Queen of Basketball” tells the story of pioneering lady basketballer Lusia Harris. The daughter of Mississippi sharecroppers, “Lusi” would sneak out of bed late at night to watch her pro basketball heroes on television. She was also tall. In her book Sum It Up, UT coaching legend Pat Summitt — Harris’ Olympic teammate — described Harris as “the first truly dominant player of modern women’s basketball, 6-foot-3 and 185 hard-muscled pounds of pivoting, to-the-rim force.” Harris was the only woman ever drafted by the NBA, and this film’s award nomination has been made more poignant since Harris passed away only a few weeks ago.

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IN THE FOURTH CIRCUIT COURT OF DAVIDSON COUNTY, TENNESSEE AT NASHVILLE Docket No. 20D1992

Rental Scene

JASON JEREMIAH JONES v.

VICKIE ALEXANDER JONES In this cause it appearing to the satisfaction of the Court that the defendant is a non-resident of the State of Tennessee, therefore the ordinary process of law cannot be served upon VICKIE ALEXANDER JONES. It is ordered that said Defendant enter HER appearance herein with thirty (30) days after March 24, 2022 same being the date of the last publication of this notice to be held at the Metropolitan Circuit Court located at 1 Public Square, Room 302, Nashville, Tennessee, and defend or default will be taken on April 25, 2022.

It is therefore ordered that a copy of this Order be published for four (4) weeks succession in the Nashville Scene, a newspaper published in Nashville.

In this cause it appearing to the satisfaction of the Court that the defendant is a non-resident of the State of Tennessee, therefore the ordinary process of law cannot be served upon VICKIE ALEXANDER JONES. It is ordered that said Defendant enter HER appearance herein with thirty (30) days after March 24, 2022 same being the date of the last publication of this notice to be held at the Metropolitan Circuit Court located at 1 Public Square, Room 302, Nashville, Tennessee, and defend or default will be taken on April 25, 2022.

It is therefore ordered that a copy of this Order be published for four (4) weeks succession in the Nashville Scene, a newspaper published in Nashville.

Richard R. Rooker, Clerk L. Chappell, Deputy Clerk Date: February 23, 2022 T. J. Jones Attorneys for Plaintiff NSC 3/3, 3/10, 3/17, 3/24/22

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